Questions to ask theist philosophers? I will soon be speaking with several

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Apr 26, 2014

I am about to graduate from one of the only universities in the world that has a high concentration of high-caliber analytic philosophers who are theists. (Specifically, the University of Notre Dame, IN) So as not to miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I have sent out emails asking many of them if they would like to meet and discuss their theism with me. Several of them have responded already in the affirmative; fingers crossed for the rest. I'm really looking forward to this because these people are really smart, and have spent a lot of time thinking about this, so I expect them to have interesting and insightful things to say.

Do you have suggestions for questions I could ask them? My main question will of course be "Why do you believe in God?" and variants thereof, but it would be nice if I could say e.g. "How do you avoid the problem of X which is a major argument against theism?"

Questions I've already thought of:

1-Why do you believe in God?

2-What are the main arguments in favor of theism, in your opinion?

3-What about the problem of evil? What about objective morality: how do you make sense of it, and if you don't, then how do you justify God?

4-What about divine hiddenness? Why doesn't God make himself more easily known to us? For example, he could regularly send angels to deliver philosophical proofs on stone tablets to doubters.

5-How do you explain God's necessary existence? What about the "problem of many Gods," i.e. why can't people say the same thing about a slightly different version of God?

6-In what sense is God the fundamental entity, the uncaused cause, etc.? How do you square this with God's seeming complexity? (he is intelligent, after all) If minds are in fact simple, then how is that supposed to work?

I welcome more articulate reformulations of the above, as well as completely new ideas.

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Mestroyer keeps saying this is a personality flaw of mine, but I'm not actually interested in what theistic philosophers have to say when questioned directly. Asking them tough questions is like a ritual challenge, which they will respond to with canned responses that don't make much sense to you.

Cultural questions would interest me far more.

"How do your religious beliefs now differ from when you were growing up?"

"What parts of other religions do you find particularly appealing?" (maybe come prepared with some common applause lights) "What about your own religious practice do you wish were more like that?"

And maybe indirectly tough questions, to see what they're thinking.

"if you could improve one thing about the world, what would it be?" (This question can be turned into a trap if combined with the problem of evil - but again, there is little to be gained by ritually combatting them, presenting the parts of the trap disassembled and seeing what their thoughts on it are is more interesting.)

"How accurate do you think our picture is of the historical Jesus? Moses? Noah? Adam and Eve?"

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Mestroyer keeps saying this is a personality flaw of mine

An imaginary anorexic says: "I don't eat 5 supersize McDonalds meals a day. My doctor keeps saying this is a personality flaw of mine."

I don't pay attention to theistic philosophers (at least not anymore, and I haven't for a while). There's seeking evidence and arguments that could change your mind, and then there's wasting your time on crazy people as some kind of ritual because that's the kind of thing you think rationalists are supposed to do.

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Why do you think they are crazy? They are, after all, probably smarter and more articulate than you. You must think that their position is so indefensible that only a crazy person could defend it. But in philosophical matters there is usually a lot of inherent uncertainty due to confusion. I should like to see your explanation, not of why theism is false, but of why it is so obviously false that anyone who believes it after having seen the arguments must be crazy.

If you don't pay attention to theistic philosophers, are there any theists to whom you pay attention? It seems to me that theistic philosophers are probably the cream of the theist crop.

Note that I honestly think you might be right here. I am open to you convincing me on this matter. My own thoughts on theism are confused, which is why I give it a say even though I don't believe in it. (I'm confused because the alternative theories still have major problems, problems which theism avoids. In a comparison between flawed theories it is hard to be confident in anything.)

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someonewrongonthenet

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They are, after all, probably smarter and more articulate than you. You must think that their position is so indefensible that only a crazy person could defend it.

For the average person, theism/atheism is just a matter of culture.

Among the very smart, successful and articulate (generalizing from 3 extremely smart theist friends and 3 family members), theism indicates certain errors of epistemology.

All 6 smart theists that I know make the following systematic pattern of errors in areas other than theismv (as in, during discussion of empirical questions): 1) over-reliance on inference ("jumping to conclusions" being a common symptom) 2) failure to use parsimony as a discriminating tool.

Additionally, 2 of the 6 do not distinguish rhetoric from argument while thinking, and sometimes accept phlogiston-style explanations, and 1 of the 6 has demonstrated too much trust in authoritative sources such as textbooks and scientific papers (A good scientist always keeps the possibility that the result is wrong and the experiment was flawed in mind) .. although to be fair a lot of equally smart atheist friends have made the same error so that may not be related to theism. Data pending on the others.

In addition to people i know personally, I find that writings from known smart theists follow the same pattern...as do the writings of many atheists. But among people who get it right...well, they' never turn out to be theists.

Sounding "intelligent and articulate" is about being able to make connections, spot internal contradictions within systems, and having a large store of knowledge and vocabulary. You can ascertain someone on that dimension within a few hours of conversation. The above skills can only be ascertained by a more in-depth discussion.

I'm not sure if the skills I listed are a matter of culture or of general cognitive health, but I know that I, at least, was making the same sort of errors (with stuff unrelated to theism) until around 16-19 years of age - at which point I began gradually undergoing a shift. (My metric for "shift" is "does my past self's written work sound stupid or naive to my present self" and I'm 24 now.) That's the age when I started seriously reading scientific literature, but it's also an important stage of brain maturation, so it's hard to say what caused it.

My point is, I don't think smart theists are "stupid", but I do think they have certain systematic recognizable deficits in their thinking which makes their epistemology untrustworthy. People who believe Theism seem to systematically make exactly the sort of errors I would expect from people who believe Theism...a position which is, in essence, a chain of over-long inferences which leads to an unparsimonious conclusion. (It's possible that knowing they were theist colors my observation, of course)

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I think theism (not to be confused with deism, simulationism, or anything similar) is a position only a crazy person could defend because:

God is an ontologically basic mental entity. Huge Occam penalty.
The original texts the theisms these philosophers probably adhere to require extreme garage-dragoning to avoid making a demonstrably false claim. What's left after the garage-dragoning is either deism or an agent with an extremely complicated utility function, with no plausible explanation for why this utility function is as it is.
I've already listened to some of their arguments, and they've been word games that attempt to get information about reality out without putting any information in, or fake explanations that push existing mystery into an equal or greater amount of mystery in God's utility function. (Example: "Why is the universe fine-tuned for life? Because God wanted to create life, so he tuned it up." well, why is God fine-tuned to be the kind of god who would want to create life?) If they had evidence anywhere close to the amount that would be required to convince someone without a rigged prior, I would have heard it.

I don't have any respect for deism either. It still has the ontologically basic mental entity problem, but at least it avoids the garage-dragoning. I don't think simulationism is crazy, but I don't assign >0.5 probability to it.

I pay attention to theists when they are talking about things besides theism. But I have stopped paying attention to theists about theism.

I don't take the argument from expert opinion here seriously because:

A. We have a good explanation of why they would be wrong.

B. Philosophy is not a discipline that reliably tracks the truth. Or converges to anything, really. See this. On topics that have been debated for centuries, many don't even have an answer that 50% of philosophers can agree on. In spite of this, and in spite of the base rate among the general population for atheism, 72.8% of these philosophers surveyed were atheists. If you just look at philosophy of religion there's a huge selection effect because a religious person is much more likely to think it's worth studying.

the alternative theories still have major problems, problems which theism avoids. I bet if you list the problems, I can show you that theism doesn't avoid them.

Edit: formatting.

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God is an ontologically basic mental entity. Huge Occam penalty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZeDFwTcnCc

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Perhaps I'm misusing the phrase "ontologically basic," I admit my sole source for what it means is Eliezer Yudkowsky's summary of Richard Carrier's definition of the supernatural, "ontologically basic mental things, mental entities that cannot be reduced to nonmental entities." Minds are complicated, and I think Occam's razor should be applied to the fundamental nature of reality directly. If a mind is part of the fundamental nature of reality, then it can't be a result of simpler things like human minds appear to be, and there is no lessening the complexity penalty.

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Thanks for engaging with me. I'm afraid you'll have to say more than that though to convince me. Of course I know about Occam's Razor and how it can be applied to God. So do the theist philosophers. My uncertainty comes from general uncertainty about whether or not that is the right way to approach the question, especially given that Occam's Razor is currently (a) unjustified and (b) arbitrary. Also, I think that it is better to be too open-minded and considerate than to be the opposite.

A. We have a good explanation of why they would be wrong.

Such explanations are easy to come by. For example, on any politically tinged issue, we have a good explanation for why anyone might be wrong. So would you say we shouldn't take seriously expert opinions if they are on a politically sensitive topic? You would advise me against e.g. asking a bunch of libertarian grad students why they were libertarians?

B. Philosophy is not a discipline that reliably tracks the truth. Or converges to anything, really. See this. On topics that have been debated for centuries, many don't even have an answer that 50% of philosophers can agree on. In spite of this, and in spite of the base rate among the general population for atheism, 72.8% of these philosophers surveyed were atheists. If you just look at philosophy of religion there's a huge selection effect because a religious person is much more likely to think it's worth studying.

Your conclusion from this is that the philosophers are the problem, and not the questions they are attempting to answer? You think, not that these questions are difficult and intractable, but that philosophers are stupid or irrational? That seems to me to be pretty obviously wrong, though I'd love to be convinced otherwise. (And if the questions are difficult and intractable, then you shouldn't be as confident as you are!)

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These are questions I would work up to or start with depending on who I was talking to. Something for Catholics, Protestants, unconventional theists, and their intersections:

"What do you find to be the strongest argument against metaphysical reasoning, especially of the sort that suggests the concept of God as a compelling foundation for metaphysics?"

"Does your philosophical conception of God intersect with decisions in your day-to-day life, or during critical periods in your life? If so, how so?"

"Most analytics are two-boxers on Newcomb's problem, but William Lane Craig makes a case for one-boxing; what do you think of his arguments? What do you think of his approach to the problem of Divine Foreknowledge, e.g. as compared to Thomists and Molinists?"

"Many mathematicians that thought about infinity and the divine ended up with baffled and baffling impressions; e.g., Cantor, Goedel. Do you see this in philosophy? Do you have any thoughts on what it implies about the concept of God and how you should go about reasoning about God?"

"Do you ever try to find room for theology in your phenomenology? If so what does that look like? Can God be examined phenomenologically? If so, how?"

"Would the idea of God be a necessary or at least highly compelling idea to hold just because of its theurgic effect, so to speak, on society and on individual philosophers? E.g., as a bastion against relative anomie and nihilism. If so, is that evidence for the justification of its philosophical underpinnings, and if so, what is the mechanism of justification? [Maybe make a reference to Plantinga's arguments against naturalism.]"

The point is setting up a conversation where you both feel like you're learning or sharing important but nuanced ideas.

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I think that you are approaching this wrong. If you had a chance to interview Dawkins, would you ask him "Why don't you believe in God?" Probably not, it would be rather disrespectful, since he publicly articulated his position many times and asking it again would imply that you didn't bother reading any of it. You ought to afford a similar courtesy to these guys, as well. Besides, presumably you want to gain some information from what they say, and asking questions with obvious answers wastes this "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity". These people have probably already publicly discussed the standard generic questions like the ones you listed.

Try pretending to be one of them and answer your own questions. Do you find their reply obvious? Then don't ask that. Not sure what they would say? Then you probably want to familiarize yourself with their research and their stance on the relevant issue, etc, then try to answer them again. Pick the questions where your model of their reply is low-confidence. When you formulate your questions, consider a template like "in your you say that <...>, but it is not clear to me how follows from , could you please explain?" Or "In you state that is true because , but suggests in that , which I have trouble reconciling with what you wrote". Etc.

If you actually put some homework into preparing your questions (few non-theists bother, since "theists are clearly wrong"), not only you are likely to learn something new, you might impress them enough to stand out and be invited for further discussions, or even a get a recommendation letter out of it.

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I completely agree, but unfortunately I don't have much time left in which to prepare. Again, I wish I had started this process sooner.

Many of those who responded, agreeing to set up meetings with me, directed me to relevant readings. So I'll be somewhat prepared for most of them.

I won't ask any questions to which I can guess the answer with high confidence.

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I expect that many of these philosophers will already have written about this sort of question. You'll get more out of these discussions if you read up on what they've already said, and tailor your questions based on that.

If you just ask basic nonspecific questions and end up with a philosopher telling you something you could have just read on wikipedia, you're just wasting your and their time.

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"What would constitute convincing evidence that your claim is mistaken?"

One of the best questions I know, suitable for many discussions and for one's self.

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"It can be hard to pick a martial arts school, because the teacher at almost any of them can beat you up as a novice, and you're too much of a beginner to figure out which of the teachers can beat up the other teachers. Someone who tries to explore theology seems to have a similar problem. What kinds of questions do you think are the equivalent of "cage matches" between different faith traditions? Do novices have a reasonable chance of reasoning to the correct tradition? If not, does that present problems for your soteriology?"

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It's not perfectly clear to me what your purposes are in asking these questions. For instance, it could be some combination of:

helping them to see the error of their ways (if you're right)
helping you to see the error of your ways (if they're right)
demonstrating your intellectual superiority (if you're right)
learning to understand theism and theists better, for the sake of getting along better with other theists
learning to understand theism and theists better, for the sake of defeating other theists more effectively
having a fun debate
watching smart people do something difficult (defending theism), to learn from them or just for fun

and several other things I can think of and probably several more I can't.

If your objectives aren't perfectly clear in your own mind you'll probably get less from this exercise than you could. If they aren't clear to us in this thread you'll probably get less helpful suggestions than you could.

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I should have been more clear. My purpose is "helping me to see the error of my ways, if I'm wrong." If I am right, then I don't care too much about converting them, but if I am wrong, I very much want to be converted. I'm basically trying to glean as much insight/wisdom from them as I can.

Any suggestions on how I can trade-off the other goals to maximize this one?

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I'm a bit of a "Superman theist" and I'm always curious about "Why infinity?"

Everything I hear theists say about ways God impacts the world seems more compatible with a finite-but-a-lot-cooler-than-you provident entity. It's also not a huge surprise that a people who used the word forty to mean "a whole bunch" might not fully grasp the difference between infinity and a really big number when they were writing things down.

I'm kinda jealous. I run into far more "Because it's in the bible" theologians than thinking theologians.

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At the cost of wide inferential distances, God as something like actus purus would be a neat singular solution to a bundle of seemingly closely related problems in their partially unknowable limits, so to speak. (Theology as king of the kinds of reason, infinite-God as their ultimate progenitor.) A cosmically monolithic but finite god "solves" such problems to only a finite degree and leaves an infinite-God-shaped hole in metaphysics. So even after exploring the complex internal mechanics of this monolith you still might as well fill the infinite-God-shaped hole with an infinite God concept to signify the hypothesis that a satisfying ultimate solution necessarily "exists" even if we don't know it yet and will only ever discover finitely many bits of it. But I'm talking metametaphysics (more like epistemology of metaphysics) here which is a field I've read very little about.

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I have to ask. Which infinity?

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I haven't seen good attempts to answer that, just agitation about the problem, which is sad because it seems important. In my amateur syncretic speculations I try to look at theology from the lens of theoretical computer science (esp. algorithmic information theory) and there you have an infinite hierarchy of oracles, there's no escaping diagonalization. It makes me wonder if human intuitions about omniscience &c. are screwed up because simple self-reference problems show some of our naive conceptions of infinity to be logically impossible. It's possibly possible that a very clever, very fundamental formalization of the self vs. non-self (same vs. not-same) distinction would "solve" the problems but I don't know if any philosophically-inclined mathematical logicians think that's plausible.

There are also sideways-bending ideas about the role of "faith" in hypercomputation, and the possibility of logical ("acausal") influence between arbitrarily distant oracle machines in the arithmetical hierarchy. (I'm not comfortable with the math, I can't tell whether a machine's oracle would "screen off" all higher degree oracles; I vaguely suspect the fomal analytical reifications are too brittle to say, but I'm totally not a mathematician.)

I sometimes try to analogize the self-reference/infinity problem to the Myerson-Satterthwaite theorem in mechanism design, where a seemingly simple epistemic problem turns out to have no solution. I find it funny to think of what the Myerson-Satterthwaite theorem and things like it would imply about a God that is actually three distinct persons.

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There are also sideways-bending ideas about the role of "faith" in hypercomputation,

I'm slightly more familiar with the theory of infinite cardinals than hypercomputation. Well, inaccessible cardinals and large cardinal axioms more generally have the property that their consistency can't be proved in ZFC in a very strong sense, i.e., adding any number of Godel statements doesn't help. Conversely, they can prove the consistency of ZFC unconditionally.

More generally, there is a hierarchy of large cardinal axioms where each one unconditionally implies the consistency of the ones below it but by Godel's second incompleteness theorem, they're consistency can't be proven (in a strong sense) from any ones below it.

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Why do you think that ___ was a false prophet. (Where _ is a prophet from another religion.)

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I find most interesting the question of which God/religion to believe in. How do they deal with the fact that the actual, historical reason that they believe in their specific God/religion is because they were born into it (most likely - not true for everyone). Have they ever considered switching religions? What was their reason not to do so?

This usually leads to very interesting discussions on the "proofs" of their religion. And they tend to be interesting indeed.

Also, I might start the debate off by more general questions, e.g. "how do you define evidence, what do you consider knowledge to be", etc. E.g. I really want to understand how they know that their God/religion is founded on truth, and not on "alien teenagers", Matrix, etc. At least theoretically.

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I find most interesting the question of which God/religion to believe in. How do they deal with the fact that the actual, historical reason that they believe in their specific God/religion is because they were born into it (most likely - not true for everyone). Have they ever considered switching religions? What was their reason not to do so?

Seconded.

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First for setting a baseline:

-Do you believe in hell and heaven?

If yes, what's their estimate about the percentage of students of their school who will go to heaven and to hell?

What's the estimate about the percentage of faculty of their philosophy department who will go to heaven and to hell?

What's the estimate about the likelihood that they themselves will go to heaven and to hell?

If it's not 100%, what the main reason why it's not and why don't they chance their actions to make it more likely?

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They've probably thought about your position much more than you have thought about theirs, so you can briefly explain your position and ask what they think is important for you to know or think about.

I would probably open with "Why are there so many theologians of false religions? Why do so many smart people get it so wrong, and how do we avoid making those same mistakes?" If the subject of my religion came up, I'd admit that I'm an atheist, but that I worry about falling for the same traps that Muslim or Hindu scholars do. After that it would depend on where the conversation went, but I'd like to find out their thoughts on a system where 4/5ths of the planet is sent to eternal torture because they made a mistake about which book to believe.

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They've probably thought about your position much more than you have thought about theirs, so you can briefly explain your position and ask what they think is important for you to know or think about.

Good point!

I'd like to find out their thoughts on a system where 4/5ths of the planet is sent to eternal torture because they made a mistake about which book to believe.

Spoiler: None of them think that. I haven't asked them but I am certain of this.

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The trouble with questions like these, I think, is that the answers of elite theist philosophers, in the first step, are most likely to be the same as the answers of much less capable theist philosophers. The points where their answers are more likely to differ are a few steps down the chain of challenge and justification.

In my experience (and by the description of Luke Muehlhauser, whose experience is probably quite a bit more extensive than mine,) philosophers of religion generally know a series of several standard challenges and answers, which have been hammered out in philosophical debate over decades to centuries, in much the way that expert chess players are familiar with a wide variety of openings and gambits. A chess grandmaster isn't going to be distinguished from a regular expert by knowing some awesome esoteric opening, but by their knowledge of how to follow up in the rest of the game which makes the opening better worth using.

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Yeah. I should think about how to get around this, and glean useful information from their expertise.

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1a) Why are you a Christian, and not a Jew or a Muslim? (Or a Mormon Christian?)

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It would be nice if you could do an article on their answers.

EDIT: Read my first comment and not this post because I've improved the structure of the text.

Here are some questions:

How confident are you that God exists? (anytime they say 100%, you could ask them if they would bet all human "souls" against one carrot that God exists to be 'sure' that they really mean 100%)

If someone, who is "otherwise" a very good person, is X% confident that God exists, for what minimum X are you at least 75% sure that s/he will go to paradise?

How confident are you that we live in a many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics? If more than 0% you could ask: if it is true, how confident are you that all "souls" from all universes go to (the same) paradise/hell? (if the same, it means you would encounter other versions of yourselves).

Does an evidence for the many-worlds interpretation (would be) an evidence against God? Does an evidence for alien life (would be) an evidence against God?

How confident are you that humans evolved from non-living matter?

How confident are you that chimps have souls? If low you could ask: If we bio-engineer an animal that is X% chimp and (1-X)% human, for what X are you 90% confident that the animal would have a soul and go to paradise or hell?

How confident are you that extremely severely mentally handicapped people have souls? If high, how intelligent do you think they become in paradise?

How confident are you that we can create a conscious being in silico? If an AI was created tomorrow, how would that affect your confidence that God exists?

How confident are you that there are fermions and bosons in paradise/hell? (if low: does that mean there is not concept of: temperature, light, sound, pressure? can time be meaured?)

In the "counter-factual" world were God doesn't exist, would you want to believe in it?

What are the advantages to believe in God (beside going to paradise)? What are the disadvantages?

If you could live for any amount of time, how would you want to live? If you could live for any amount of time, how long would you want to live on Earth? If more than 1 day, you could ask them why wouldn't you rather be in paradise? How confident are you that you will go to paradise? How scare are you to go to Hell?

How confident are you that we cannot feel pain in paradise?

After 3^^^3 years in paradise, how much do you think we can remember?

How confident are you that one can commit suicide in paradise if one wants to?

What do you consider as "playing God"? In what case do you think it is good to play God? How well do you think we can (possibly/physically) play God?

How confident are you that we are in a simulation?

What set of memories do you think we bring with us in paradise (the ones we have before we die? all the ones we made in our life? etc.)

How confident are you that cryonised humans keep their soul?

How sad are you sad when someone near you dies? Why?

What would be different in the world if there was no God?

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Are these fellows mostly catholic theists?

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Half catholic, half protestant I believe.

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Who is your favorite philosopher?

Do you have a favorite atheist philosopher?

If not the same guy as for question number one, who is your favorite philosopher that 95% of the philosophy academy never reads?

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First, I should note that all the most common/obvious questions have been thoroughly answered (where thorough refers to length). For many of these questions, you could get a better answer from reading what has already been written about it. Edit: you probably don't want to ask these questions as bluntly as I've worded them.

Why is choice of god mainly determined by which country a person was raised in, like eg language but unlike eg science? Does belief in God help one make more accurate predictions (not "better explanations") than using a secular model?

Why is wisdom praised throughout the Bible, except for a reversal in the New Testament, where standard wisdom is condemned as an opponent to Godly wisdom? Why is it that higher education leads to lower rates of theism, and what is this evidence of?

Why are various good traits assigned to God? For example, why is God considered forgiving if He demands a blood sacrifice (human sacrifice according to Christians) before He can forgive sins? I know humans who can forgive without requiring any sacrifice, nor even a request for forgiveness, remorse, etc. Why is God considered just, when He is willing not only to excuse evildoers, but actually punish the innocent in their place as a sacrifice (and eternally reward people for a trivial thing with no moral value like believing in Jesus)? Why is God considered merciful what with going out of His way to eternally punish people in Hell? I've heard that the answer to this sort of question is that God is holy -- is holiness some sort of terrible character flaw that we must avoid at all costs, or something to be emulated?

Why do people say that Jesus willingly died for our sins, when He clearly didn't (Matthew 26:39) and don't forget that disobeying God is frequently regarded as resulting in eternal damnation. Some people say that Jesus suffered in our place -- shouldn't that mean eternal damnation, not being dead for 3 days? Why can't I die for everyone's sins, or at least my own? Why all the confusion with what exactly "death" means in the Bible, especially if it starts in Genesis 3 yet is prevented by believing in Jesus?

Compare Genesis 3:3-5 vs Genesis 3:22. Why is the serpent considered a liar? Why is God upset at humans knowing good and evil in Genesis, yet elsewhere wants that distinction taught?

Consider the sort of worlds created by humans to interact without other humans -- eg the worlds in which MMORPGs are set. These worlds have moral laws, unbreakable ones. For example, in many MMORPGs, theft is simply against the laws of physics in that universe, as is murder but not dueling, much like in our universe traveling faster than the speed of light is forbidden. Why wasn't our universe designed with moral laws of some kind to protect one person from another (eg such a universe could allow dueling to the death, gambling, and adultery, but not murder, theft and rape, as part of the laws of physics). Free will and choice are not the answer, as I am not free to travel faster than the speed of light, regardless of my will or choice, nor is the ability to violate another's will necessarily and improvement in free will.

How would the world be different if someone else (eg the listener, or Mother Teresa) were made omnipotent and omniscient in place of God?

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