In Defence of Natural Theology – A Reply to Alistair Grimes

In Defence of Natural Theology-

A Reply to Alistair Grimes

Brian Davies 0. P.

Having read my earlier article ‘Theology and Natural Theology’ (New Blackfriars, June 1977), Mr. Grimes apparently regards me as an example of the one who, in Kierkegaard’s words, “at the outset took the wrong way and then continued to go farther and farther along this false way.” Has he successfully justified this critique?

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The first stage of Grime’s argument consists of a reply to my comments on Alasdair MacIntyre’s ‘The Logical Status of Relig- ious Belief (Metaphysical Beliefs, London 1957). I observed (a) that because one speaks of belief in God it does not follow that natural theology must be dismissed because it has appealed to proofs of God’s existence; (b) that MacIntyre could not abolish natural theology by saying that belief in God is a matter of decision or that belief in the existence of an acceptable natural theology would compel a loving response to God; (c) that it was not impossible to identify ‘the God of the philosophers’ with ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’. According to Grimes, my comments are confused. He says: (1) “Belief in a religious context does not express a degree of uncertainty in the way that it would with empirical statements . . . As long as belief expresses a degree of uncertainty in relation to knowing we cannot believe and know at the same time.” (2) “It is certainly not a characteristic of religious beliefs that we hold them provisionally or conditionally whilst awaiting evidence.” (3) “We cannot decide to believe in the material world, but the existence of God does not present itself in such a brute fashion.” (4) “By claiming that if I believe in God, meaning (in part) that I know that God exists, then belief is invol- untary . . . Davies begs the question. He assumes that we have grounds, not only for asserting that God exists, but that He actually does exist.” (5) “By saying that acceptance of proofs offered by natural theology does not guarantee a loving response, Davies is saying far more than he thinks; for what then is the purpose of natural theology?” ( 6 ) One cannot identify the God of the philosophers and the God of the theologians because one cannot, for example, point to God as one can point to Mrs. Thatcher. “We sim- ply have two sets of descriptions and no obvious way of bringing

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them together. ”

(1) Nowhere in my paper do I deny that, where ‘I believe’ expresses uncertainty, we cannot believe and know at the same time. On this I agree with Aquinas, S.T. 2a 2ae 1, 5 . My view, and, indeed, that of Aquinas, is that because A believes that there is a God but does not know it, it does not follow that B cannot know that there is a God and deny that he believes in God, where ‘believes’ expresses uncertainty. There is an ambiguity in ‘If something is believed in it cannot be provable or proved’. One could mean either (a) ‘If A believes that-P then A does not know P’ or (b) “If A believes that-P then nobody knows that-P’. With qualification I am prepared to accept (a); but (b) is false. My case against MacIntyre is that he does not allow for this. (2) I am quite prepared to accept that “belief in a religious context does not express a degree of uncertainty” if that is taken to mean that someone’s expression of belief in God may be taken as an assertion to know that God exists. This is the whole point of my remarks on knowledge and belief on page 259. In that case however, it is possible for someone to claim to believe in God because he has reason for doing so. The natural theologian’s point is that in making this claim the believer may be justified, i.e. it may be that there is a God and that the believer knows that there is. (3) I deny that no religious belief can be held conditionally or provisionally. There are plenty of people who hold all sorts of beliefs which can fairly be called ‘religious’ and who would not be in the slightest bit surprised to find that they were false. A lot of Roman Catholics display such an attitude regarding papal teach- ing on sex. One might also consider the possibilities involved when a person is hovering on the verge of changing his denomination. There are also people who believe in God without evidence. This does not mean that there can be no evidence however. (Should it be of any interest, and in reply to Grimes’ personal question, I do not say “I’m just believing in God till some better evidence turns up, then I’ll know that He exists.” Like Aquinas, I say “I believe in God” and thereby declare that I know God exists. Again the reader is referred to the discussion in my article on’p. 259) (4) Perhaps Grimes finds it harder to believe in God than a material world. That is his problem, but he should not assume that everybody is in the same predicament or that everybody must be. “We cannot decide to believe in the material world, but the existence of God does not present itself in such brute fashion.” Insofar as I can understand this (what is this material world whose existence we cannot doubt? Cf. Wittgenstein, On Certainty para. 35: “And yet ‘There are material objects’ is nonsense.”) this is just what God’s existence does for some people. For them God’s exist-

I reply to these points as follows:

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ence appears certain, his reality as ‘brute’ as that of my neighbour. “Where can I escape from thy spirit? Where can I flee from thy presence?” Towards the end of his article Grimes draws attention to the apparent inability of Biblical writers t o think that God’s existence is questionable. He should have remembered this fact earlier on. (5) From my claim that ‘I believe in God’ can mean (in part) ‘I know that God exists’ it certainly does not-follow that I assume God’s existence. I could only be held to assume this if I observed “I believe in God and by this I mean (in part) that I know God exists.” (Cf. On Certainty para. 13: “For it is not as though the proposition ‘It is so’ could be inferred from someone else’s utterance: ‘I know that it is SO.’ Nor from the utterance together with its not being a lie, -but can’t I infer ‘It is so’ from my utterance ‘I know etc.’? Yes; and also ‘There is a hand there’ follows from the proposition ‘He knows that there’s a hand there’. But from his utterance ‘I know . . .’ it does not follow that he does know it.”) What I said in my article was that people can say ‘I believe in God’ and that for them this can mean ‘I know that God exists’. The whole point of this was to draw attention to the fact that there is no reason why the fact that people say they believe in God must lead us to conclude that they cannot, as MacIntyre’s account im- plies, be making knowledge claims which, from their point of \>iew, spring not from a decision to believe but acompulsion to do

(6) The purpose of natural theology is the same as that of any kind of philosophy, viz. to get to the truth. Grimes evidently considers that because people cannot be guaranteed to act on what is shown to be true the task of showing it to be true, or of trying to do so, is pointless. One might just as well argue that research con- cerning lung-cancer and cigarette smoking is pointless since many people can study the results of the research and continue to smoke. It might be thought that, as far as natural theology is con7 cerned, this reply is ludicrously cerebral. Such, however, is not my intention and is definitely not implied by my previous article. Ob- viously, natural theology, if available and if accepted, is of relev- ance to practice. One has only to consider the scheme of something like the Summa Theologiae to see how this can be so. Aquinas was a natural theologian; he thought there was evidence for God. Qua natural theologian he thought it possible to say something about God, something which, if true, ought to be of interest to everybody since it entailed some assertion about what it means to be alive. (7) Grimes is right, if hardly original, in denying that we can point to God as we can to a human being. And, in spite of the way some theologians talk, I agree that God has very little in common with Mrs. Thatcher. I do not, however, accept that there is no obvious

so.

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way of bringing together descriptions of God given by theologians and philosophers. If both, from their respective positions of faith and argument (assuming these to be exclusive) were asked for a description of Cod their replies may partly differ. The proponent of argument may not, for example, speak of a Trinity (because he has not argued for a Trinity) while the believer might. But then, two people can describe Paris differently if one has visited the city as an American tourist and the other as a refugee. To justify the claim that both tourist and refugee have described (or succeeded in referring to) Paris, it will be enough if certain (but not just any) parts of their descriptions agree, e.g. if both speak of the city x miles north-west of Chartres, containing the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. As James Ross puts it, “If A and B are talking to each other about something each refers to as t, they can be talking about the same thing even though they ascribe (or, if we told them to tell us all their beliefs about that thing, would ascribe) markedly different sets of attributes to what they refer to by ‘t’.” (Philosoph- ical Theology, p. 50) I do not want to lay it down that ‘God’ is a proper name, but I would claim that if the so-called philosophical and non-philosophical believers both agree that they are talking abput a transcendent, omnipptent being upon whom the world depends for its existence (such is the case with, say, Barth and Aquinas) we can allow that they are talking about God. (The question of referring to God and the significance of ‘omnipotent’ in this connection is well brought out by Robin Attfield’s ‘The Lord is God: There is no Other’, Religious Studies 13, pp. 73-84.) If this is denied it seems hard to justify the claim that there is such a thing as belief in God. For there are a variety of theologies even within such .a supposedly monolithic structure as the Catholic Church (contrast Aquinas, Blondel, Rahner, De Chardin, Newman and Gilson), and if we require absolute agreement about the description of God before we can say that two people believe in God it looks as if a large number of those whom we normally call the- ists cannot really be such. If we end up by saying this, however, one suspects that there is at work a constricting and quite unhelp- ful stipulative definition.

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Before passing on to the second part of Grime’s reply I wish to make some remarks about certain elements in the first part of his paper not so far mentioned. (1) Grimes ascribes to me the view that natural theology “contrasts strongly with Liberal Protestant- ism, and in particular Barth and Tillich.” I never mentioned Liber- al Protestantism-a curious phenomenon which I actually find, in the person of authors like Ritschl, rather congenial and in no nec- essary conflict with what 1 regard as natural theology. And if Grimes thinks of Barth as a Liberal Protestant he had better read

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Barth again. (2) Regarding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, Grimes takes ‘I know that I have two hands’ adding “Wittgenstein argues that there is no possibility of doubting such statements or of making a mistake about them . . . he does not agree with Moore, who treats them as empirical propositions. “As I pointed out in a recent review (New Blackfriars, October 19,77), it is difficult to extract a simple theory from On Certainty. Wittgenstein there discusses a large number of statements (of which ‘I know that I have two hands’ is only one) and he does not say the same of all of them. Grimes’ airy reference to “the pointlbeing made in On Certainty” and to what Wittgenstein thought about “such statements” is hardly en- lightening therefore. Clearly Wittgenstein has difficulty with Moore but he makes several points, he seems t o make a point and then draws back (cf. para. 6 17)’ and he does not clearly say of all the statements which he considers that they are not what Grimes seems to mean by empirical, i.e. that they are not based on evidence (cf. paras. 239-241 ; 171). Grimes says that ‘the point’ of On Certainty “is the opposite of that implied by Davies”. Davies’ point was that ‘I believe that - X’ can express an inability to doubt that - X. In the pasages I quoted that is just what Wittgenstein seems to be saying. “Is it maybe in my power what I believe? Can I believe for one moment that I have ever been in the strato- sphere? No . . .’’ Cf. also para. 42: “It would then be possible to speak of a mental state of conviction, and that may be the same whether it is knowledge or false belief. To think that different states must correspond to the words ‘believe’ and ‘know’ would be as if one believed that different people had to correspond to the word ‘I’ and the name ‘Ludwig’, because the concepts are dif- feren t. ”

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In Part I€ of his paper Grimes makes the following points: (a) Tillich’s ‘God does not exist’ can be understood as a grammatical remark; (b) To ask ‘Does God exist?’ is to forget Peter Winch’s argument as reproduced in Ethics and Action (London, 1972) pp. 12-13; (c) The conclusions of natural theology do not have any religious significance. The Bible presupposes that natural theology is irrelevant.

I reply as follows: (1) (a) is wearisomely familiar and I did not attempt to criticise it in my discussion of Tillich. For the sake of argument, and using the terminology of Professor D. Z. Phillips, I actually stated that “It is possible to construe ‘God does not exist’ as a way of denying that God’s existence is what Hume called a matter of fact.” (p. 261) As it happens, I do not regard the ‘this is a grammatical remark’ approach as very helpful for theology; cf. Wittgenstein,

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Zettel 144: “How words are understood is not told by words alone. (Theology)” One can see the difficulties by looking at Grimes’ version of it. Here, someone offering a ‘grammatical remark’ like ‘God does not exist -He is eternal’ is “bringing out what can and cannot be said about God.’’ But (1) people say different things about God so whose way of talking is to be considered normative? and why? (2) even if I cannot say such and such about God given some established way of talking about God, does it follow that if I do say such and such I cannot be talking about God? In dealing with (2) consider the assertion that ‘soap is a cleansing agent’. This looks like a good candidate for the title ‘grammatical remark’ and, as far as I know, nobody denies what is said by it. Suppose, however, it were discovered that soap was not a cleansing agent-something which seems possible if unlikely. Would we not therefore have made a discovery about soap? (2) Peter Winch’s arguments quoted by Grimes are interesting and I am by no means in total opposition to them. Like Winch, I agree that in assessing someone’s remarks about something one must pay attention to what they say so as to avoid asking the wrong questions and so as to ask the right questions. There is something to be said for distinguishing the “apparent logical form of a proposition” and its “real one” (Tractatus 4.0031) and there is point in distinguishing what Wittgenstein called ‘surface grammar’ and ‘depth grammar’ (Philosophical Investigations para. 6 64). Where then am I in disagreement with Grimes? Evidently over the reading of remarks made about God. I say that people talk about God in such a way that the questions asked by natural theologians are not always confused; and I stick by that conclusion. Grimes might reply that he has shown it to be mistaken. But what is his defence of this? He says “God is not a being among beings who, as a matter of fact, might or might not exist” This is not very clear. What kind of a being is God not? What is it to exist ‘as a matter of fact’? In what sense is ‘God might not exist’ mistaken? According to Grimes there is “a difference in principle between finding out if God exists and finding out if Edinburgh Library has six floors”. If that means that God is not like Edinburgh Library, I agree; but what are the differences supposed to be? And how are they discovered in the first place? Could they not be seen to follow from what natural theologians have argued? Nothing Grimes says shows that they cannot. Instead he tells us that ‘‘we must see what kind of reality God has for the religious believer, and this can only be done by looking at the context in which the believer talks about God, in prayer and worship.” But which particular religious believer are we talking about? What is meant by ‘context’ here? Why should we only be interested in the language (whose language?) of praise and worship? (I could have wished Grimes had noted a later remark of Winch: “None of this is to say that belief in oracles and witches

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(or in God) cannot be criticised-there are more kinds of criticism than one.” ‘Language, Belief and Relativism’ in Contemporary British Philosophy, ed. H. D. Lewis, London 1976, pp. 336-7.) And why should one assume that God’s reality can be understood by looking at what anybody says? Can people not fail t o understand what they are talking about? These are the sort of questions prompted by the work of D. 2. Phillips whose way of talking Grimes seems to have swallowed quite uncritically. Presumably he has also swallowed the criticism of naturai theology offered by Hume and Kant and he states that unless I circumvent this the case must go against me by default (compare ‘He has not shown that X’s objection to the possibility of astronomy is defective because he has not considered the arguments of the flat-earthed). I agree that a modern natural theologian would do well to consider Hume and Kant, but my failure to do so in my article does not invalidate the point made there; the arguments of natural theolgians can only be rejected by considering them individually and on merit, not by blithely declaring ‘God does not exist’. (Incidentally, the reader might like to consider a question which seems relevant at this point: Can the arguments of Hume and Kant be taken as arguments against natural theology? Assuming that someone like Aquinas was a natural theologian, one is inclined to answer nega- tively on the ground that his particular position is never properly considered by them.) (3) I have summarized the last three paragraphs of Grimes’ reply as (c), but he actually says several things and these must be dis- tinguished for comment. (1) Grimes wonders about the “religious significance” of natural theology explaining that “I cannot see what His (sc. God’s) existence has to do with worshipping Him.” (Cf. ‘I cannot see what my wife’s existence has to do with my loving her’) He compares ‘God created the world’ with ‘the record for staying underwater without oxygen is ten minutes’. The only comment I can make on this is that Grimes is either incapable of emotion or else has paid little attention to what natural theologians have meant by God. Often they have concluded Him to be a loving source of all goodness who has created man for happiness with Him and who orders the world by his providence. If someone finds such an idea of no religious significance what more can be said? Suppose someone tells me that somebody loves me and suppose they provide evidence of this. Does my subsequent indifference make the information and the evidence irrelevant? (2) Grimes states that “Religion is not a theoretical matter, and I cannot understand how an argument could bring anyone to understand what is involved in loving or trusting God.” Granted that religion is not a theoretical matter (though since ‘theoretical’ is such a slippery term, that is granting a lot), it does not follow that no

religious belief contains any theory. Secondly, from the fact that Grimes cannot understand how an argument could bring anyone to understand what is involved in loving or trusting God we cannot conclude that religious belief cannot bring anyone to such an understanding. Thirdly, can any human being understand ‘what is involved’ in loving or trusting God? In this connection I would draw attention to 1 Timothy 3:16 (“And great beyond all question is the mystery of our religion”) and to some comments by Dr. Hugh Price in a forthcoming number of The Downside Re- view. In a discussion of D. Z . Phillips’ Religion Without Explana- tion (London 1976) Price examines the use of certain terms (nephele and doxa) in the Septuagint and suggests that in the pas- sages in which they occur “we have accounts of events which were witnessed by people, who according to the accounts themselves had no proper understanding of them.’’ He continues, “People in the past, and even now, have assumed that they understand the language involved-particularly perhaps when they have thought of it as being metaphorical. But what is more likely to be true is that in the past people who have studied the Bible have not been aware of this linguistic evidence to which I have tried to draw attention. If we do not understand these words, then we are not able to say that we have a complete understanding of the revela- tions we find in the Bible which are so central to both Judaism and Christianity.’’ (3) Grimes writes that “The Bible shows a people incapable of understanding an enterprise such as natural theology.” Even if this were true it does not follow that natural theology is irrelevant just as it does not follow that advanced medical research is irrelevant because texts cited by archeologists show us people incapable of understanding advanced medical research and just as it does not follow that biblical cosmology cannot be questioned in the light of modern astronomy. In any case, I contest the view that the bible does show a people incapable of understanding natural theology. In addition to the evidence I cited previously (pp. 264-267 which Grimes ignores) I offer the following supplementary points: A It has become increasingly evident in Pauline studies that Paul

is influenced by Hellenistic Judaism and Palestinian Judaism, indeed, that the two are not clearly distinguishable. As W. D. Davies notes, “Judaism for a long period before the first cen- tury had been open to Hellenising forces of an aggressive kind. These forces impinged upon it both from within and from without the borders of Palestine. And what historical probab- ility suggests has been confirmed by Jewish literary sources and archeological discovery. Rabbinic sources have been more and more revealed to reflect Hellenistic influepces in both their vocabulary and ideology.” (Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, London 1970, p. viji)

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B Palestinian and Hellenistic Judaism are often contrasted with respect to their approach to God. C. J. Montefiore (Judaism and St. Paul, London, 1914, p. 95) explains that “A small con- tact with philosophy seems to have made God more distant and less approachable.” G. F. Moore (Judaism, 3 vols Oxford 1927-30, Vol 1 p. 421) observes “How innocent were the Pal- estinian masters of an abstract or transcendent or any other sort of philosophical idea of God.” The contrast is hard to establish with precision however. As Davies shows, the rabbis can come up with an inferential argument remarkably like a proof ex motu. As I. Abrahams notes (Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels. Cambridge 191 7 ) even the Hellenistic Philo again and again warmly talks of God as a father. And the text of Romans 1 has strong parallels with Philo, Josephus and the Wisdom of Solomon (cf. especially Wis. Chap. 3). “The many abstract concepts in Rom. 1 and 2 are of Greek not of Old Testament-biblical origin, such as God’s ‘invisible nature” God’s ‘eternal power and divinity,’ the term ‘immortality,’ the ethical term ‘proper conduct’, known from the Stoics, the list of vices in Chap 1 to depict decadent moral life, the terms ‘nature’, ‘conscience’ in Chap 2, and many others,” (G. Born- kamm, ‘Faith and Reason in Paul’, Early Christian Experience, SCM 1969, p. 32. Cf. E. Norden Agnostos Theos for the question of literary dependence between Paul and Hellenistic Juda- ism. Also relevant in the Bornkamm collection is ‘The Revela- tion of God’s Wrath’ and the references cited there.) This is not to say that Paul’s presentation is that of the Hellenistic synagogue. Bornkamm (op. cit.) has indicated how his talk about knowing God runs together with his language about judgement in a way that is distinctive.

C In accounting for such a phrase as zaytein ton theon (Acts 17: 27) attempts have been made to interpret the point made as an ordinance to obey the Torah. As E. Haenchen observes, however, the author of Acts does not regard the Torah as revealed to pagans and the passage makes better sense if understood in the light of othtrs like Philo’s De spec. leg. 1 36 and 39. (The Acts of the Apostles, Oxford 197 1, p . 524.) In the light of the above I conclude that, although I may be a

very long way down the wrong way, Grimes has failed to demon- strate the fact and has not succeeded in offering a convincing, alt- ernative map to the one I was using.

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Documents

In Defence of Natural Theology – A Reply to Alistair Grimes