The Classical Theist’s Naïve Optimism about Reason

And the religious games we play to avoid facing the harsh reality of nature

In The Best Argument for God, Patrick Flynn defends classical theism as the basis of Catholicism.

Classical theism is about the philosopher’s God, meaning that this sort of theist posits a metaphysical abstraction as the esoteric substance of lay theology. So, whereas the Christian masses might emphasize the sacredness of scripture, the miracles that distinguish their religion, and the worship of Jesus, classic theists are more interested in supporting their religion with philosophy and specifically with metaphysics.

As he says in a video summarizing his case, Flynn takes himself to be picking up from Thomas Aquinas’s replies to what Aquinas regarded as the two strongest atheistic arguments, these being the problem of evil and the question of whether philosophical naturalism is metaphysically sufficient so that theism becomes unnecessary to explain whatever you want to explain. Flynn means to turn the tables on that second objection to theism since Flynn thinks theism is a stronger, more comprehensive metaphysical model than atheistic naturalism.

Flynn is wise to delve into epistemology for his account of the “best argument for God,” and perhaps he’s also brave to do so since reflecting on the nature of knowledge is death to theism.

Epistemology has to do with what counts as knowledge, as rational justification for beliefs, or as a proper explanation. The more you understand what reasoning and knowledge are, the less seriously you should take either classical/philosophical theism or the unreflective, folk kind of religiosity.

The naivety of classical theistic metaphysics

For instance, Flynn lays out some of the groundwork for his argument in a short article called “What Sort of Explanation Is God?” There he says that the relevance of “natural theology,” the kind that attempts to support religion with rational evaluations of evidence, is that “If we are taking the traditional metaphysical approach of moving from effect to cause, we are really locating the necessary condition for something.”

The classical theist makes the metaphysical move of positing a deity as the necessary condition of all the contingent things in nature. As Flynn says, “we might ask how contingency is possible, and the cosmological argument provides an explanation — as something which removes the mystery of contingency — by causing us to see that there must be something which has always existed and which exists of its own accord, otherwise no contingent thing could exist.”

And his point is that even if this isn’t a scientific, causal explanation, it’s “a substantial ontological explanation.”

Yet this classical theistic take on metaphysics is already at odds with the more cautious, skeptical view of reason that the scientific method made commonplace several hundred years ago. Classical theists are largely rationalistic as opposed to empiricist or skeptical, in that these theologians and religious philosophers assume naively that the human capacity for reason enables us to know, as Flynn says, “the necessary condition for something.”

The shift in modern thinking, though, was from dogmatic pontification and armchair speculation about all reality, to reflecting on ourselves and our societies as the fallible sources of these pronouncements. Inevitably, that self-reflection led to doubts about the merits of metaphysical speculations.

Infamously, that doubt was pushed to some extremes, as in the case of positivism. David Hume, for example, said that nontrivial knowledge is derived from the senses, and all statements that aren’t empirical in that sense are trivial word games or misleading, “occult” musings. Mathematics, then, amounts to stipulative, trivial knowledge about the relations between concepts. And metaphysics that goes far beyond scientific theories is idle fantasy.

Positivism turned out to be an unsustainable, quasi-religious prejudice, but most analytic philosophers think the truth about metaphysics is somewhere between what positivists and what rationalists or classical theists say about it. As I understand the matter, the consensus is that we needn’t ban metaphysical speculation, but we should understand that this kind of reasoning is more like poetry than science. The truth status of metaphysical systems matters less than their aesthetic merits since they’re essentially artworks.

Just as we might attempt to summarize the meaning of our life’s experience or of our worldview by painting a picture, writing a song, or crafting a poem, we might develop a metaphysical system that expresses our final word on existence. And just as the painting, song, or poem is hardly an adequate map or characterization of the entire universe, metaphysical speculations say more about us than anything else — unless the ontology is naturalistic in that it builds carefully on scientific theories.

The principle of sufficient reason

Anyway, how is metaphysics relevant to Flynn’s best argument for theism? He says, “when it comes to natural theology, I actually can move further in understanding the nature of the cause by understanding what must be true about it to produce the relevant effect — for example, that it must have necessary existence (to explain contingency), or be purely actual (to explain change).”

That is, the classical theist reasons metaphysically to deduce what the universe’s cause must be like and finds that the cause is just the philosopher’s God, that is, a necessary, simple, timeless, immaterial, fully actualized being.

Indeed, says, Flynn,

we can often know more about the ultimate cause than we can about proximate causes through effect-to-necessary-condition reasoning. While I cannot know that it’s a golf ball blocking the water flow just by knowing something must exist which can block the water flow (it may be an onion), I actually can know that God — that is, of classical theism — is the ultimate cause of the contingent order just by knowing something must exist which can impart existence to any contingent essence without requiring existence to be imparted to its essence (and thus its nature must be pure existence as such, of which there can only be one such entity).

And Flynn stresses that this religious metaphysics “is genuinely explanatory, even if inferential, because significant discoveries about fundamental reality are made and significant mystery — perhaps the most significant mystery — removed, even if questions remain.”

But how does Flynn know that “something must exist which can impart existence to any contingent” thing? Suppose that some such metaphysical conclusion satisfies the human penchant for reasoning. The skeptic would still point out that we don’t know reality must conform to the human capacity for reasoning.

What classical theists presupposed was the principle of sufficient reason, which as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says is a “powerful and controversial philosophical principle stipulating that everything must have a reason, cause, or ground.” This principle amounts to a “simple demand for thoroughgoing intelligibility.”

Alas, in this context this “principle” practically begs the question of theism.

To say that everything must be intelligible to us — as in our species of mammal that we know from biology evolved ultimately from single-celled organisms on this planet — is like saying the Earth is central to the universe. And God alone would have organized things that way, in which case you wouldn’t need any further theistic argument: the principle of sufficient reason would suffice

But this optimism about the power of human reason isn’t a kind of knowledge; instead, it’s the most transparent, wide-eyed vanity — which is ironic for Catholics who make much of their doctrine of the original sin of pride. Just as infants and children think they deserve to be the center of attention because they don’t know any better, classical theists presume that human ways of thinking encompass all possible forms of existence so that from our armchair we can know what’s “metaphysically necessary.”

Natural doubts and toy deductions

The more reasonable alternative is the naturalistic account that builds on cognitive science. Reason evolved not to inform us about the nature of ultimate reality, but to enable us to cope with local conditions in the wild and in human tribal societies. Our instinctive, intuitive ways of thinking are mental tools that happened to improve our chances of surviving under those conditions.

The rules of thumb we employed were honed over millions of years, as rival mutant heuristics proved lethal to their enthusiasts. Just as birds’ wings adapted to the task of flying, and predators’ claws adapted to the purpose of tearing into prey, human thinking adapted to the business of outsmarting the environment so that even fragile mammalian bodies like ours could prosper, thanks to our big brains.

Of course, we elaborated on those intuitive principles and prejudices, developing formal logic, critical thinking, and scientific methods of inquiry. These enabled us to learn about matters far beyond our formative evolutionary situation. But the question is whether the classical theist’s metaphysical mode of speculation is another such legitimate elaboration. And in so far as this mode takes for granted the principle of sufficient reason, the mode looks more like a racist or sexist prejudice, like one that might have made sense in prehistoric tribes but that’s glaringly obsolete when understood in modern hindsight.

Take, for instance, the difference between wondering about the cause of a blocked garden hose — one of Flynn’s examples — and wondering about the source of all natural beings. The former is conjectural rather than mystical in that it’s informed by ordinary experience. Whatever’s blocking the hose must be small enough to have been lodged in that space, and perhaps the hose has been clogged like this in the past because a child living next door played a game of inserting marbles into the hose. The hose owner remembers this and infers that the current blockage likely has a similar explanation.

Now, the classical theistic “reasoning” about the source of all contingent things isn’t like that at all. No ordinary human experience could be relevant to identifying any such supernatural cause. Indeed, the concept of causation itself would be irrelevant since causes and effects are found in natural patterns. The relation between a so-called necessary being and a contingent one would be miraculous, not causal. Again, to say it’s causal would be like a boastful child presuming to know about quantum mechanics.

Theists might here appeal to religious experience as the source of confidence in reasoning about supernature, but that would only open a can of worms. Suppose that, like the freewheeling metaphysical systems, religious experiences tell us more about ourselves than about what happened at the start of the universe. Why trust, then, the theist’s assurance that bare abstract reasoning tells us the necessary condition of nature?

After all, there are cheap necessities, as in the stipulations that amount to rules for the playing of games. How do we know the classical theist’s logic isn’t just a social game or the elaboration of a fantastic mythos that comforts those with old-fashioned temperaments? The principle of sufficient reason would be like a fantasy author’s imaginary axiom that lays the fiction’s groundwork.

If you assume that human reason can answer all possible questions, then sure, you can reason your way into deducing that contingent things must come from something that’s necessary. Otherwise, we’d have an unanswered question, and we’d have to content ourselves with uncertainty. But skepticism or humility isn’t the game that classical theists are playing. They prefer “faith” to doubt or to rigorous honesty, rather like how fans of JRR Tolkien prefer wizards and dragons to the sci-fi paraphernalia of aliens and spaceships.

None of that stops the classical theist’s “argument” from being circular since the most straightforward defense of the principle of sufficient reason amounts to a presupposition that God exists so that God could have equipped us with this miraculous ability to know the answers to all farfetched questions. Similarly, our enjoyment of fiction is circular in that we must choose to suspend our disbelief to allow ourselves to get caught up in the story.

Elsewhere, Flynn concedes that he struggles “to refute absurdism — the denial of this intelligibility.” This absurdism, Flynn says, is the conviction that “reality eludes complete understanding,” ‘that there are coherent questions that lack satisfying answers (i.e., “the universe just is, and that’s all there is to it.”),’ and that evil is “a rampant force devoid of any higher purpose.” In other words, the “absurdism” is the denial of the principle of sufficient reason, which says, as Flynn puts it, that “reality is completely intrinsically intelligible.”

“Essentially,” he says, “I ponder how the world must be under the assumption that absurdism is false, hoping that in another life, clarity will replace the current fog of understanding. Part of my hope in heaven — the yearning for the radically different hereafter as described in the tradition of the beatific vision — is not just to find perfect love, but also perfect knowing, where all becomes transparent beyond any shadow of doubt.”

My point, then, is that that religious hope functions just like the reader’s suspension of disbelief in her enjoyment of some work of fiction. The classical theist is only posing as a hyper-rational philosopher. What he or she is really doing is playing a game with herself and society.

Resolving mysteries with sophistry and gibberish

Or take that earlier assurance of Flynn’s, that his kind of metaphysics is “genuinely explanatory” “because significant discoveries about fundamental reality are made and significant mystery — perhaps the most significant mystery — removed, even if questions remain.”

Here Flynn would be met with the typical atheistic rejoinder that classical theism doesn’t resolve any mystery but only transfers natural mysteries to the bigger, supernatural enigma of “God.”

Does anyone know what a necessary, simple, complete, timeless, immaterial, fully actualized being really is? No? Then positing such a being as the ultimate reason why something’s stuck in your garden hose is vacuous.

This reminds me of those pretentious adolescent poems or those “continental” philosophical tomes that present you with so many word salads. String together some impressive big words, as supplied by a thesaurus, and you have the illusion of erudition or profundity, but it’s shallow at best. Very little skeptical probing is needed to show that the classical theist’s metaphysical discourse features mere gibberish.

Suppose we say that God created the universe, and that God is supernatural. Would that remove any significant mystery about contingent things in nature? Flynn says “questions remain” for the theist, but that’s a laughable understatement. Indeed, the theist faces a dilemma, depending on whether she’s thinking of the philosopher’s abstract, absolute being or the folk theist’s personal deity.

• If she posits the former, her supernatural metaphysics won’t solve any mystery because her explanation will be circular, and her explanans (the divine “cause” of everything) will be semantically empty.
• If she posits the latter, her explanation will benefit from its familiarity since it extends the human experience of designing and building artifacts. But her explanation will be incoherent and preposterous since the qualities of personhood are natural, and no sense is given to a timeless, immaterial mind. Thoughts happen in time, one after another, and they’re processed by an embodied brain that could sensibly be said to have wants and mental maps because the physical body is limited and mortal and needs to chart its course and plan its activities with mental representations. None of that would apply to a supernatural person.

Whether the classical theist prefers to (a) beg the question with vain epistemic principles, (b) equivocate between those two conceptions (the philosopher’s absolute and the folk’s personal deity), (c) obfuscate our ignorance about supernature with philosophical word salads, or (d) resort to self-centered metaphors to cope with the alienness of cosmic reality, there’s nothing especially reasonable about classical theism. Sophistry isn’t the same as proper, honourable reasoning.

Explanatory power and fictional superpowers

Flynn’s best argument itself, as I said, is meant to turn the tables on the naturalist. Far from being metaphysically empty, theism is supposed to be a better, more comprehensive explanation than any atheistic alternative.

But this is like a child saying that adult pastimes are weak because they don’t account for childish expectations. Why should adult discourses be subject to children’s frivolous presumptions? Likewise, why should reason be held hostage by naïve, premodern optimism about our penchant for indulging in metaphysical speculations?

The classical theist may seem to answer more questions than the naturalist, but that’s only because this theist resorts to the above sort of sophistry. If you admit that you don’t know the meaning of life, and I tell you that that meaning is snarglefargle, have I scored a point or improved on the situation? No, because my answer would be without philosophical merit; indeed, I’d have played a silly word game, inviting you to pretend you know more than you do. But the philosopher’s God is no better than snarglefargle, or than the flying spaghetti monster that Richard Dawkins helped popularize.

The naturalist adheres to the scientific principles of humility, so she doesn’t pretend to be able to answer all metaphysical or cosmological questions. Living in the modern world, she’s learned to doubt herself and thus to lower her philosophical expectations. Even when we think critically and logically, all our concepts are models that simplify their subject matters. We extrapolate from our limited experience, building on the discoveries of previous generations, but it’s prudent to humble ourselves before the upshot of scientific knowledge.

The classical theist’s optimism about metaphysics may have made sense when we had no idea when and where we truly stood in nature, or when we were ignorant of the universe’s inhuman age and size. Now that we know the alienness of the cosmic scope of natural things, the theist’s persistence in resorting to terrestrial intuitions and archaic heuristics comes across as grotesque. As a portrait of supernature, classical theism is just as comically presumptuous as a child’s finger-painting of a forest or a planet.

Much of the explanatory power of naturalism isn’t logical but pragmatic. We accept models like quantum mechanics even if they don’t make sense or they’re wildly counterintuitive because they’re technologically empowering.

The classical theist, too, can appeal to pragmatism, and say that theism works as a philosophical model since religions based on that model are socially useful. That would be perilous, though, because secular cultures, too, can unite a society, and theistic religions divide as much as they unite. In any case, whereas scientific and naturalistic models are tested in this life, the real benefits of theism are supposed to be found in the afterlife, as the correct theology allegedly acts as the magic key to unlock God’s grace.

The explanatory power of naturalism is this-worldly and technological, whereas classical theism is supposed to offer us superpowers. Here, then, Flynn’s comparison of naturalism with supernaturalism, as though they were two competing rational models, amounts to a category error. The sophistry of classical theism leads us to think that supernaturalism is just another kind of cosmology or philosophical narrative, but naturalistic philosophers and theists are playing very different games.

The science-centered philosophers are humanists who mean to do what they can to help people here and now, recognizing roughly what Flynn calls “absurdism,” the direness of our existential situation in the cosmic wilderness. Likely, our species will one day go extinct, and no one will be left to mourn our passing. Meanwhile, the universe will continue to evolve or to decay for no comforting reason.

The classical theist, too, means to help folks here and now, but only by redirecting their attention to a fantasy world, to God’s so-called heavenly kingdom which we’ll encounter in the afterlife. But whereas critical thinking and technological applications of scientific models empower us to overcome obstacles in the present, including the obstacles of religious frauds, classical theism operates like just such a dubious scheme. The theistic model is untestable since it’s directed towards supernature which supposedly lies across the barrier of death, and the model is fallacious and puffed up rather than being an honest, honourable attempt at philosophy.

We can understand theism’s appeal, of course, since properly understood, naturalism is shocking and discouraging, so religious folks retreat to a social game that sustains a reassuring fantasy. It’s just that when we don our philosopher’s hat, we should show bad arguments no mercy.

Theism’s infamous unfalsifiability

Finally, in “What Sort of Explanation Is God?” Flynn adopts another explanatory strategy, which is to test hypotheses by comparing how well they account for known facts. “For example,” he says, “I see something mysterious, like a puddle of water, and wonder how it got there. I then entertain various scenarios (hypotheses) that might make the occurrence of that puddle probable, and then fix my mind on what seems the most likely, such as my sprinkler turning on.”

Thus, “When thinking about the nature of God, how likely is it that we would expect to see the sorts of large-scale features of reality if God exists vs. if God did not exist? Features such as contingency, stability, order, consciousness, rationality, suffering, etc.”

But the theist’s use of this strategy is quite bogus. Appealing to the best explanation when comparing possibilities makes sense only when you’re dealing with genuine hypotheses. That means they must be falsifiable; otherwise testing their ability to account for data will always be inconclusive, or it will invite fraud.

For instance, explaining a puddle of water by positing a sprinkler is testable because a sprinkler is a physical device that can break down in systematic ways. If the owner happens to know the sprinkler is broken, that discounts this hypothesis.

Neither the classical theist’s deity nor the folk theist’s super-powerful parental figure is remotely testable in that way since “God” isn’t part of any well-formed hypothesis. If that weren’t so, we could have scientific knowledge of how God operates. God’s ways, though, are supposed to be inherently mysterious, and even the Bible warns, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test” (Deut. 6:16).

Due to the above slipperiness in speaking about God — the circularity, equivocation, vacuity, and so on — you can tell a just-so story to make God’s existence seem compatible with any conceivable scenario.

Suppose God created a lifeless universe. Could that scenario be theistically “explained”? Sure, it could since maybe God wanted some quiet time to meditate by himself. Or suppose God created a wholly evil universe, one resembling Hell. Could that be “explained” by assuming that God is good rather than evil? Sure, it could since maybe God wanted to investigate the nature of evil. At any rate, the theist can appeal to mystery to avoid a logical discounting of theism — and that makes theism no genuine hypothesis at all.

Flynn thinks theism better explains features such as contingency, stability, order, consciousness, rationality, and suffering than naturalism. But even that selection of features is anthropocentric since the full story of the universe’s evolution won’t be so familiar or reassuring.

According to one cosmological scenario, as mapped out in Fred Adams’ and Greg Laughlin’s The Five Ages of the Universe, after the current Stelliferous Era of the universe will come the Degenerate Era, when planets are flung from their orbits around stars and the stars all go out. And after that there will come the Black Hole Era:

White dwarfs, brown dwarfs, and neutron stars are expected to eventually die through a process known as proton decay, when the subatomic particles they are made of literally fall apart. Cosmologists predict this will occur late in the Degenerate Era…And when the last remnants of stars rot away at the particle scale, only black holes will remain, dominating what is left of the universe.

But what’s relevant here is the drastic difference in time scales between these eras. The current era in which stability, order, and life are possible is hypothesized to last from 1 million to 100 trillion years after the Big Bang. The Degenerate Era will last from 1 quadrillion to 1 duodecillion years after the universe’s origin.

Yet the Black Hole Era is predicted to last from 10 duodecillion to 1 googol years after the Big Bang, spanning “an unimaginably long stretch of time, even for astronomical timescales.” This is because black holes will likely take practically forever to decay.

How long is a googol? It’s 1 followed by a hundred zeroes.

To begin to understand the difference between the lengths of these eras, we can follow how the authors of this model reduce the vast numbers to cosmological decades, which are “logarithmic in size, with base 10. Each successive cosmological decade represents a ten-fold increase in the total age of the universe.” Thus, the Stelliferous Era lasts from 6 to 14 such decades, the next era will last from 15 to 37 such decades, while the Black Hole Era will last from 38 to 99 such decades. And after that will come the Dark Era in which the universe has turned into an inert void and time “will” have no meaning.

The point is that the Black Hole Era will outlast our current era. By a lot.

Of course, this is just one cosmological model, and maybe it’s all wrong; indeed, it doesn’t consider dark energy. But no scientific model of the universe’s development is anthropocentric, meaning that each of them will present some such lopsided evolution favouring a perfectly alien reality, such as one dominated by black holes in a lightless void.

The question for the theist, then, isn’t just whether we can explain the conditions familiar to organic life, by assuming that God created the universe. Sure, a deity might want to relate to fellow living things. But that’s only a biased, human-centered reading of the universe that’s currently in evidence. No, the question is whether such a deity would have created a universe in which the emergence of life is dwarfed in time by, say, the emergence of black holes.

Now, because theism isn’t a legitimate hypothesis, the theist can fudge everything and tell a just-so story to make it look as though something like the Black Hole Era is compatible with classical theism or the Bible. Maybe the biblical God has a reason for much preferring black holes to humans. But these alien, absurdist cosmological probabilities will take their toll, driving the theist into ever more strained sophistries to make natural theology seem like a rational explanation.

And that’s why we should discount that theology as a pseudo-hypothesis.

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