Can Wanting to Believe Make Us Believers?

This is the 12th and last in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is Daniel Garber, a professor of philosophy at Princeton University, specializing in philosophy and science in the period of Galileo and Newton. In a week or two, I’ll conclude with a wrap-up column on the series.

Gary Gutting: In the 17th century most philosophers were religious believers, whereas today most seem to be atheists. What explains this reversal?

Daniel Garber: I think that it is fair to say that in the 17th century most people, not just philosophers, were believers and that it was simply taken for granted that people of ordinary intelligence would believe in God, in just the way that people today take it for granted that people of ordinary intelligence have faith in the authority of science. Many important scientists and mathematicians in the period were also believers, including Bacon, Descartes, Boyle, Pascal and Newton. Not that there weren’t atheists in the period, but atheism was something that in many circles needed a special explanation in a way in which belief didn’t.

In many circumstances, atheism was considered so obviously contrary to evident reason that there had to be a special explanation for why atheists denied what was so obvious to most of their contemporaries, in much the way that today we might wonder about those who deny science. What changed? I hesitate even to speculate. There was the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, political revolutions, Darwinism, the wars of the 20th century, a lot. As a result science and religious faith have, in a way, exchanged places, and a general and widespread faith in science has replaced the earlier general and widespread faith in God. But even so, God is not dead among the philosophers. There is still a very significant community of believers among philosophers. I’m personally not one of them, I should say, and I would doubt that they constitute a majority. But even so, I think they cannot be ignored.

G.G.: What you’ve described could be taken as a social and cultural change that says nothing about the truth of religious claims. Contemporary atheists often say that the development of science since the 17th century has undermined the intellectual basis of theism. What do you think?

D.G.: Unlike some, I would hesitate to say that modern science has refuted religion in any strong sense. Religion and theology are complicated and subtle; they cannot easily be refuted. In the past religion has confronted a variety of scientific challenges, from the rediscovery of ancient scientific systems like Aristotle’s in the 12th and 13th centuries, to Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton in the 16th and 17th centuries, to Darwin in the 19th and beyond. These discoveries have forced religion to adapt in various ways, but those contemporary advocates of religion who are, in my opinion, the most sophisticated don’t feel that they have to oppose science in order to keep their faith.

For some this adaptability is a sign that religion is empty, on the assumption that to be meaningful religion must be falsifiable. But I don’t agree. Philosophers of science have rightly rejected naïve falsificationism, and it shouldn’t be accepted in the philosophy of religion. Again, I am not a believer. But even so, I don’t underestimate how difficult it is to refute theism.

G.G.: “Naïve falsification” is the idea that a theory should be rejected as soon as one of its implications is shown to be false. In fact scientists rightly allow revising a theory to avoid falsifications, but only if the revised theory eventually makes new predictions that might be falsified. What science doesn’t allow is continual revision to avoid any and every refutation. But isn’t that just what religious believers do, resulting in what the 20th-century English philosopher Anthony Flew called religion’s “death by a thousand qualifications”? Is there any evidence that believers would accept as refuting their position?

D.G.: I’m not a believer, so I’m not in a position to say. First of all, it’s worth noting that some of the biggest empirical challenges don’t come from science but from common features of life. Perhaps the hardest case for believers is the Problem of Evil: The question of how a benevolent God could allow the existence of evil in the world, both natural evils like devastating earthquakes and human evils like the Holocaust, has always been a great challenge to faith in God. There is, of course, a long history of responses to that problem that goes back to Job. While nonbelievers (like me) consider this a major problem, believers have, for the most part, figured out how to accommodate themselves to it.

But science offers challenges as well. For some who believe in the literal truth of the Bible, for example, discovering that the Bible contains claims that are literally false would have to lead to a crisis of faith, or, perhaps more likely, to a rejection of scientific claims. But for more sophisticated believers I suspect that the claims of religion are more like broad structural principles that can be reinterpreted as we learn more about the world. In physics, one might be reluctant to give up broad structural ideas like the existence of general conservation principles, even when some localized experimental evidence may seem to go against them. In that circumstance one might choose to keep the broad and well-entrenched principles and figure out how to reinterpret them so as to fit with experience. I think that some believers may consider the existence of God in something of the same way. But, again, I don’t say any of this with a lot of confidence since I am not a member of the community of believers.

G.G.: What do you see as the current status of traditional metaphysical arguments for God’s existence?  Are they of merely historical interest?

D.G.: Good question. It is, in fact, a good question why they were so widespread in the history of philosophy. Not every theist — then or now — would necessarily think that arguments for the existence of God are necessary, or even possible. And if belief in God were generally taken for granted, as it was in the 17th century, then trying to prove the existence of God would seem to be an unnecessary exercise. But at various times and places in that century there were genuine anxieties about the existence of these mythical atheists, and perhaps we should understand the arguments in that context.

Marin Mersenne, Descartes’s close friend and sponsor, and an important mathematician and scientific thinker in his own right, claimed that there were over 50,000 atheists living in Paris in 1623. In his massive commentary on Genesis, where he advanced that claim, he offered 35 arguments for the existence of God. For Mersenne and his contemporaries, the idea of the atheist was terrifying. Many thought that, without the threat of divine punishment, there was no reason for people to act morally. Establishing the rationality of belief in God had high stakes for them.

Today, those who don’t believe, philosophers and others, don’t seem to pay much attention to the contemporary literature on proofs for the existence of God. Proofs for the existence of God have become something of an empty intellectual enterprise, I’m afraid.

G.G.: So are you saying that the philosophical books are closed on the traditional theistic arguments? Have atheistic philosophers decisively shown that the arguments fail, or have they merely ceased thinking seriously about them?

D.G.: Certainly there are serious philosophers who would deny that the arguments for the existence of God have been decisively refuted. But even so, my impression is that proofs for the existence of God have ceased to be a matter of serious discussion outside of the domain of professional philosophy of religion. And even there, my sense is that the discussions are largely a matter of academic interest: The real passion has gone out of the question.

G.G.: I wonder if the lack of passion reflects the fact that centuries of discussion have not yielded any decisive conclusion about whether the arguments work. That, I think, would support an agnostic rather than an atheistic conclusion. On the other hand, many contemporary atheists reject theism on the grounds that there is simply no serious case that has been made for God’s existence. As an historian of philosophy (and an atheist), what’s your view on this issue?

D.G.: Centuries of discussion have certainly not led to a consensus about the arguments. But we cannot forget that at some times in the past, there was a general consensus that God exists, and, perhaps, a general (though not universal) consensus that some of the arguments, for example the argument from a first cause, are correct. The question is really why arguments that were once convincing have lost their power, something that is true of many arguments from the history of philosophy.

I think, though, that the lack of passion reflects more than anything else the cultural change that has made faith and religion less central to our lives, since at least the Enlightenment. This has left the concern to prove the existence of God to people of faith who are concerned with the intellectual grounds of faith, that is, largely philosophers who are believers, philosophers of religion and theologians. You are right to say that many contemporary atheists reject theism because they see no convincing reason to believe. While I am by no means dismissive of religion, that’s where I would place myself.

G.G.: In your essay in Louise Antony’s collection “Philosophers Without Gods,” you say, “Much as I try, much as I may want to, I cannot be a believer.”  Why can’t you — and why would you want to?

D.G.: I can’t believe because I’m not convinced that it is true that God exists. It is as simple as that. Belief is not voluntary, and there are no (rational) considerations that move me to believe that God exists. In all honesty, I will admit that I don’t have a definitive argument that God doesn’t exist either. Which is to say that I refuse to make the judgment that some make that it is positively irrational to believe in God in an objective sense. But without convincing affirmative reasons to believe, I’m stuck. If others find reasons that convince them, I’m willing to discuss them and consider them. Who knows? There might be a convincing argument out there, or at least one that convinces me.

On the other hand, it is easy say why I might want to believe. I see people around me — often very smart and thoughtful people — who get great comfort from believing that God exists. Why wouldn’t I want to be like them? It’s just that I can’t.

G.G.: Wanting to believe in God suggests Pascal’s wager argument, which remains for many the most appealing case for religious belief. What do you think about it?

D.G.: Formally, the argument has many well-known flaws, though it also has its friends. Even knowing the flaws, I do find myself somewhat moved by it. The reason is that at the core of the argument there are some very compelling intuitions. Basically, the argument turns on the idea that if there is a God, and we believe in him, we then have a shot at eternal happiness. If God doesn’t exist, then we are stuck in this very finite and imperfect life, whether we believe in him or not. So, it would seem, for all sorts of reasons, we should want to believe in him. The problem (perhaps insuperable) is taking these plausible considerations and turning them into a genuine argument.

But the real worry about the argument comes at a later moment, I think. It is important to remember that Pascal’s wager it isn’t an argument for the truth of the proposition that God exists, but an argument for why we should want to believe that God exists: It only tells us that it is to our advantage to believe, and in this way makes us want to believe, but it doesn’t give us any reasons to think that God actually exists. In a way, I’m already convinced that I should want to believe. But there is a step from there to actual belief, and that’s a step I cannot personally negotiate. Pascal tells us, roughly, that we should adopt the life of the believer and eventually the belief will come. And maybe it will. But that seems too much like self-deception to me.

G.G.: You seem to be ignoring what is often taken as the heart of Pascal’s argument: a cost-benefit calculation that you should believe in God because the likely benefits of belief are greater than the likely benefits of nonbelief. Put that way, the argument seems morally dubious, leading to William James’s comment that God would likely exclude from heaven precisely the sorts of people who believe because of such an argument. Is this a misreading of Pascal?

D.G.: That objection doesn’t really move me. Pascal’s wager is certainly a cost-benefit argument. But, as I noted earlier, the important thing is what happens afterward. If behaving like a believer transforms you and causes the scales to fall from your eyes, and allows you to appreciate the existence of God in a way that you couldn’t before, when you resisted belief, then why should God complain? In any case, we are not in a very good position to figure out what God might judge on such an issue — if, indeed, there is a God. But what worries me more than what God might think is the possibility that I may corrupt my soul by deceiving myself into believing something, just because I want it to be true. For a philosopher, that’s a kind of damnation in this life.

This interview was conducted by email and edited. All interviews from this series can be read here.

Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy since 1960,” and writes regularly for The Stone.