INTRODUCTION
Greg Dawes gives a detailed discussion of why he thinks theistic explanations are not informative. I have taken the snippets of all the arguments, and counter-arguments he considers so that we will have a detailed understanding of his overall case before I assess it:
Greg Dawes gives a detailed discussion of why he thinks theistic explanations are not informative. I have taken the snippets of all the arguments, and counter-arguments he considers so that we will have a detailed understanding of his overall case before I assess it:
MECHANISM & QUANTIFIABLE PREDICTIONS--A “lovely” explanation is an informative one…”it is one that specifies some articulated causal mechanism…whose description allows us to deduce the precise details of the effect. There are two aspects to this definition: the first has to with the description of a mechanism, while the second has to do with our ability to deduce what would follow if the proposed explanation were true. I have already noted that a proposed theistic explanation will often lack an intermediate causal mechanism—one that would mediate between the divine will and its effect—and I have suggested that this fact is not necessarily a fatal objection to a hypothesis of this kind. What I want to focus on here is [that] second aspect…Such a hypothesis will not only have empirical content—it will exclude certain states of affairs—but it will also specify in some detail just what it does and does not predict; it will make quantifiable predictions...While physicists speak of entities that are both unobservable and very different from those we encounter every day, they can do so with some precision by way of mathematics. Theism lacks this precise language with which to speak of God.”
RESPONSE—Our everyday intentional explanations also fail to make quantitative predictions and use vague terms like ‘belief,’ ‘desire,’ ‘hope,’ and so on. We use such terms to explain and predict people’s behavior even when we lack any clear idea of what mental states they denote or the mechanisms by which they are expressed. So, even though such explanations are less than lovely, they still have explanatory force and enable us to make some rough and ready predictions. So, unless you are prepared to reject all forms of intentional explanation, the fact that a proposed theistic explanation lacks precision does not seem a fatal objection.
MYSTERIOUSNESS OF AGENT—This is a good response at first sight until we take into account the mysteriousness of the divine agent. The divine agent is mysterious in terms of its mental and action predicates. The focus here is on action predicates. What could it mean to say that God creates something, or that he speaks to us? In what sense can we say that God commands, forgives, comforts, or guides? If we appeal to analogical language then we are really saying that these terms exceed human comprehension. So, our language lacks precision. We are unable to specify precisely what it would mean for God to speak, to guide, or comfort. A second option is to argue that we can use such terms of God in a literal sense. This won’t work either because when we act or create things it is by way of bodily movements, and so we do not know what to expect to observe if God acts.
RESPONSE—A theist could respond that we can specify how God would act, in order to create. We would expect God’s creative act to be a basic action, so that whatever God wills should simply come into existence, “by magic,” as it were. There are no means that he need employ.
LACK OF EMPIRICAL CONTENT—But this doesn’t answer the objection because it doesn’t propose or specify a divinely willed goal, and so will have little empirical content.
Here’s another way of making the point. Our everyday social interaction is guided by our shared understanding of the social norms governing human behavior. We don’t need to attribute certain beliefs and desires to the person in question to understand his behavior. However, we lack anything analogous to the shared social norms that can help us to understand human behavior in the case of God. A believer might object that we know how God will act based on how God has acted in the past, in similar situations. But this begs the question: it assumes that the believer already has a successful theistic explanation, either of past events or of actions reported in a divine revelation. Given the mysteriousness of the divine agent, we can never be confident that God is the explanation of something that needs explaining...We have a good idea how a human being might go about comforting or punishing a fellow creature, but because God has an infinite range of choices open to him, we cannot know with any degree of confidence how God would or wouldn’t act in order to achieve his goals.
THE DANGER OF ACCOMODATION—What would it mean to ‘hear’ the ‘voice of God’ when God is an incorporeal being who does not ‘speak’ in our everyday sense of the word? Precisely because this claim is less than informative, it is easy for the believer to suggest it is true, that what I am experiencing is indeed the Holy Spirit.
RESPONSE—The theist could reply that this is no more than a danger, and one that faces many proposed explanations. It could, in principle, be countered by a sufficiently robust process of testing.
ACCOMODATION AGAIN—The problem is that this would require us to make further predictions, each of which would be equally ‘unlovely.’ It follows that this weakness in proposed theistic explanations seems inescapable. We can never be confident that we are not being deceived by a clever use of words.
ASSESSMENT
Dawes weaves a tangled mess in arguing that theism lacks informativeness. I will now unweave it, and respond in kind.
LOVELINESS & MECHANISM—I have already shown in my post titled: Fit With Background Knowledge, that theistic explanations are lovely since the type of causation a theistic explanation may rely on fits nicely with our background knowledge.
LOVELINESS & PRECISION—Secondly, I showed in my post titled: Testability, that because theism entails axiarchism, theistic explanations will have enough empirical content to “specify in some detail just what it does and does not predict; it will make quantifiable predictions.” Recall the definition of axiarchism: that reality should be intrinsically structured toward the positive or optimal realization of moral, intellectual, and aesthetic values. This provides a mathematical ratio for us to judge whether reality is on balance value-generating. Moreover, any aspects of reality that are anti-value generating will count as evidence against axiarchism, all else held equal. If anything then, theism provides a robust backdrop against which naturalists can try to explain why some fact is better explained on their view since naturalism just is the fairly uninformative notion that the physical is ontologically prior to the mental. Lastly, because inference to the best explanation is contrastive by nature, it doesn’t matter if theism scores poorly on informativeness so long as naturalism scores even lower. While I think naturalism does score lower, I also think that theism scores well, rather than poorly, with respect to informativeness.
LOVELINESS & MENTAL PREDICATES— Dawe’s does motion in the direction of a worry he raises in section 3.3.3 of his book, namely, the coherence of the concept of God. In that section he grants that analogical language can still be informative and form the basis of a successful explanation, but he says, the more serious issue is that the theistic conception of God may be being internally inconsistent. Indeed, even if we haven’t found any inconsistency, it may only be because our language about God is analogical and covers up the internal incoherence somehow.
Notice that axiarchism makes theism highly informative without having to rely on the application of well-defined mental predicates to God. Since it is God’s goodness that entails axiarchism, we need not speak of God’s desires or beliefs to deduce the effects of a theistic explanation.
While nobody has demonstrated the internal inconsistency of the theistic conception of God, it sure would be nice if we had some panacea that would avoid all future challenges, and even Dawes’s argument from ignorance about analogical language masking internal incoherence. Fortunately for the theist, there is such a move to make. Yujin Nagasawa has successfully argued (A New Defense of Anselmian Theism) that theism is only committed to the notion of the greatest conceivable being, and the notion of the greatest conceivable being doesn't entail an OMNI-God. Hence, if there are any arguments which show the logical impossibility of a single attribute, or set of OMNI attributes, then all that would show is that we cannot conceive of an OMNI-God. It wouldn’t show that theism is necessarily false since God is the only the greatest conceivable being.
LOVELINESS & ACTION PREDICATES—Dawe’s would still protest that the action of God in the world is mysterious since it lacks empirical content, and because God has an infinite number of options available to Him, we don’t know what we would observe if God really were to go about comforting, guiding, and the like.
Once again, axiarchism, and kenotic theism provide the answer. We have already seen that axiarchism has a high degree of empirical content (contra Dawes), but notice also that the definition of axiarchism includes the notion that reality will be intrinsically structured toward the positive, or optimal realization of moral, intellectual, and aesthetic values. Theism entails this. That means that God will act within and through the natural universe to achieve an intrinsically value-generating universe.
Also recall that in my post titled: Past Explanatory Success, I argued that kenotic theism is a research programme that predicts God will also act in a non-interventionist, and non-coercive manner to achieve an intrinsically value-generating universe. This means that we can predict what we would observe if God were to act to achieve His goal of a value-generating universe. Specifically, we can predict that theistic explanations will involve both a proximate natural explanation and an ultimate theistic complementary explanation in order to achieve an intrinsically value-generating universe.
Better still, I already gave three ways that God could act so as to achieve an intrinsically value-generating reality that is consistent with our background knowledge in my post titled: Fit With Background Knowledge. And recall that I argued in my post: Past Explanatory Success, that we have strong corroboration that God has acted just as kenotic theism and axiarchism predict so that we can be confident such types of action actually are the modus operandi of God in general. So, unless God has some countervailing reason to stray from this general practice one or more times (e.g. if there is something we need to know that cannot be read off of nature, or imbued into ‘her’ formational economy), we know that the prior probability of how and why God will act will be consistent with past actions that have already been corroborated.
LOVELINESS & THE DANGER OF ACCOMODATION— I think Dawes’s fundamental point is that precisely because we don’t know what it would mean to ‘hear’ God, or for God to ‘speak’ we also don't know what we should observe if such were actually the case. Such cases make alleged acts of God reported by the believer easy to wrongly accommodate precisely because of a lack of informativeness.
However, assuming that a personal interactive relationship with God is possible, and value-generating, there is no problem describing, predicting, and explaining what it would mean to ‘hear’ God, or how God would ‘speak’ to us from within the research programme of kenotic theism, and the auxiliary hypothesis of axiarchism. Specifically, we would predict a value-generating non-miraculous causal disposition within our brains that will have a proximate natural explanation and description of what is happening when we have such an experience, while also having a complementary and ultimate theistic explanation. This natural experience can be triggered by public revelation, good and beautiful aspects of creation, and the like. Indeed, there is a brand new field of study called neurotheology that Dawes can read if he would like to see how informative such a theistic research programme can be.
Even if theism is informative enough to predict that this is how God would act in a personal relationship, I think there is still the danger of accommodation. In order to be justified in these cases, we would appeal to the notion of a properly basic belief that is appropriately grounded (either by something like the Holy Spirit, or the context of the experience itself is appropriately grounding such a basic belief). Even still there is a danger of accommodation. Fortunately, there are two ways to corroborate these cases further.
First, review all my posts here and in my section on Paul Draper's work to see that theistic explanations not only can succeed, but have succeeded in showing that naturalism is very probably false partly because theism is very probably true. This will provide independent verification of one's religious experience within the theistic tradition of Christianity. This provides powerful reason to think one's religious experience isn't spurious.
Second, I think this danger can be significantly mitigated by keeping in mind that any comforting and guiding from God that doesn’t fit well within the highly corroborated research programme of kenotic theism, and the auxiliary hypothesis of a value-generating universe will have a very low prior probability in the absence of countervailing evidence. So, if somebody claims that God has comforted them after murdering innocent people, we know such a claim is spurious. Or again, if somebody claims that God is guiding them to commit adultery, we know such a claim is false.
But as I say, I am not sure that all things considered, such experiences are, all by themselves, that improbable on atheism because of the experiences of competing religious adherents, even though they are probable on theism (the fact that our nervous system is disposed to form such beliefs is very probable on theism). This is a different danger of accommodation than the one Dawes hones in on relating to informativeness. In any case, theistic explanations can still be very informative for the reasons I have argued, even within the domain of religious experience. Whether or not such religious experiences also constitute significant evidence in favor of theism over naturalism is a separate question. If we don't keep them separate then we would be confusing two different problems: the loveliness of theistic explanations in general, and the explanatory power of theistic explanations on our total evidence for religious experience in particular. Even if the loveliest explanation for religious experience is a theistic one, that doesn’t mean that the likeliest explanation for religious experience isn’t an atheistic one when we consider other known facts that might have more explanatory power on the assumption that atheism is true. In any case, the description, prediction and explanation behind the questions of how and why God would act in the world can be answered in a lovely and informative manner.
CONCLUSION
Kenotic theism coupled with axiarchism is a much lovelier explanation than naturalism or atheism. This is primarily due to the fact that kenotic theism and axiarchism gives us something like a robust set of social norms for mathematically describing, complementarily explaining, and empirically predicting what God would do, and how God would do it without the need for ascribing mental predicates to God. Naturalism on the other hand is the relatively uninformative hypothesis that the physical is ontologically prior to the mental.
While theistic explanations of publicly accessible events, states of affairs, and singular and general causes are highly informative, there is a danger of accommodation for those who report having a private experience of God wherein they think God is comforting them, and guiding them. However, the success of kenotic theistic explanations in general, and axiarchism can significantly decrease this danger so that all things considered, theistic explanations of all types have an adequate degree of informativeness.
RESPONSE—Our everyday intentional explanations also fail to make quantitative predictions and use vague terms like ‘belief,’ ‘desire,’ ‘hope,’ and so on. We use such terms to explain and predict people’s behavior even when we lack any clear idea of what mental states they denote or the mechanisms by which they are expressed. So, even though such explanations are less than lovely, they still have explanatory force and enable us to make some rough and ready predictions. So, unless you are prepared to reject all forms of intentional explanation, the fact that a proposed theistic explanation lacks precision does not seem a fatal objection.
MYSTERIOUSNESS OF AGENT—This is a good response at first sight until we take into account the mysteriousness of the divine agent. The divine agent is mysterious in terms of its mental and action predicates. The focus here is on action predicates. What could it mean to say that God creates something, or that he speaks to us? In what sense can we say that God commands, forgives, comforts, or guides? If we appeal to analogical language then we are really saying that these terms exceed human comprehension. So, our language lacks precision. We are unable to specify precisely what it would mean for God to speak, to guide, or comfort. A second option is to argue that we can use such terms of God in a literal sense. This won’t work either because when we act or create things it is by way of bodily movements, and so we do not know what to expect to observe if God acts.
RESPONSE—A theist could respond that we can specify how God would act, in order to create. We would expect God’s creative act to be a basic action, so that whatever God wills should simply come into existence, “by magic,” as it were. There are no means that he need employ.
LACK OF EMPIRICAL CONTENT—But this doesn’t answer the objection because it doesn’t propose or specify a divinely willed goal, and so will have little empirical content.
Here’s another way of making the point. Our everyday social interaction is guided by our shared understanding of the social norms governing human behavior. We don’t need to attribute certain beliefs and desires to the person in question to understand his behavior. However, we lack anything analogous to the shared social norms that can help us to understand human behavior in the case of God. A believer might object that we know how God will act based on how God has acted in the past, in similar situations. But this begs the question: it assumes that the believer already has a successful theistic explanation, either of past events or of actions reported in a divine revelation. Given the mysteriousness of the divine agent, we can never be confident that God is the explanation of something that needs explaining...We have a good idea how a human being might go about comforting or punishing a fellow creature, but because God has an infinite range of choices open to him, we cannot know with any degree of confidence how God would or wouldn’t act in order to achieve his goals.
THE DANGER OF ACCOMODATION—What would it mean to ‘hear’ the ‘voice of God’ when God is an incorporeal being who does not ‘speak’ in our everyday sense of the word? Precisely because this claim is less than informative, it is easy for the believer to suggest it is true, that what I am experiencing is indeed the Holy Spirit.
RESPONSE—The theist could reply that this is no more than a danger, and one that faces many proposed explanations. It could, in principle, be countered by a sufficiently robust process of testing.
ACCOMODATION AGAIN—The problem is that this would require us to make further predictions, each of which would be equally ‘unlovely.’ It follows that this weakness in proposed theistic explanations seems inescapable. We can never be confident that we are not being deceived by a clever use of words.
ASSESSMENT
Dawes weaves a tangled mess in arguing that theism lacks informativeness. I will now unweave it, and respond in kind.
LOVELINESS & MECHANISM—I have already shown in my post titled: Fit With Background Knowledge, that theistic explanations are lovely since the type of causation a theistic explanation may rely on fits nicely with our background knowledge.
LOVELINESS & PRECISION—Secondly, I showed in my post titled: Testability, that because theism entails axiarchism, theistic explanations will have enough empirical content to “specify in some detail just what it does and does not predict; it will make quantifiable predictions.” Recall the definition of axiarchism: that reality should be intrinsically structured toward the positive or optimal realization of moral, intellectual, and aesthetic values. This provides a mathematical ratio for us to judge whether reality is on balance value-generating. Moreover, any aspects of reality that are anti-value generating will count as evidence against axiarchism, all else held equal. If anything then, theism provides a robust backdrop against which naturalists can try to explain why some fact is better explained on their view since naturalism just is the fairly uninformative notion that the physical is ontologically prior to the mental. Lastly, because inference to the best explanation is contrastive by nature, it doesn’t matter if theism scores poorly on informativeness so long as naturalism scores even lower. While I think naturalism does score lower, I also think that theism scores well, rather than poorly, with respect to informativeness.
LOVELINESS & MENTAL PREDICATES— Dawe’s does motion in the direction of a worry he raises in section 3.3.3 of his book, namely, the coherence of the concept of God. In that section he grants that analogical language can still be informative and form the basis of a successful explanation, but he says, the more serious issue is that the theistic conception of God may be being internally inconsistent. Indeed, even if we haven’t found any inconsistency, it may only be because our language about God is analogical and covers up the internal incoherence somehow.
Notice that axiarchism makes theism highly informative without having to rely on the application of well-defined mental predicates to God. Since it is God’s goodness that entails axiarchism, we need not speak of God’s desires or beliefs to deduce the effects of a theistic explanation.
While nobody has demonstrated the internal inconsistency of the theistic conception of God, it sure would be nice if we had some panacea that would avoid all future challenges, and even Dawes’s argument from ignorance about analogical language masking internal incoherence. Fortunately for the theist, there is such a move to make. Yujin Nagasawa has successfully argued (A New Defense of Anselmian Theism) that theism is only committed to the notion of the greatest conceivable being, and the notion of the greatest conceivable being doesn't entail an OMNI-God. Hence, if there are any arguments which show the logical impossibility of a single attribute, or set of OMNI attributes, then all that would show is that we cannot conceive of an OMNI-God. It wouldn’t show that theism is necessarily false since God is the only the greatest conceivable being.
LOVELINESS & ACTION PREDICATES—Dawe’s would still protest that the action of God in the world is mysterious since it lacks empirical content, and because God has an infinite number of options available to Him, we don’t know what we would observe if God really were to go about comforting, guiding, and the like.
Once again, axiarchism, and kenotic theism provide the answer. We have already seen that axiarchism has a high degree of empirical content (contra Dawes), but notice also that the definition of axiarchism includes the notion that reality will be intrinsically structured toward the positive, or optimal realization of moral, intellectual, and aesthetic values. Theism entails this. That means that God will act within and through the natural universe to achieve an intrinsically value-generating universe.
Also recall that in my post titled: Past Explanatory Success, I argued that kenotic theism is a research programme that predicts God will also act in a non-interventionist, and non-coercive manner to achieve an intrinsically value-generating universe. This means that we can predict what we would observe if God were to act to achieve His goal of a value-generating universe. Specifically, we can predict that theistic explanations will involve both a proximate natural explanation and an ultimate theistic complementary explanation in order to achieve an intrinsically value-generating universe.
Better still, I already gave three ways that God could act so as to achieve an intrinsically value-generating reality that is consistent with our background knowledge in my post titled: Fit With Background Knowledge. And recall that I argued in my post: Past Explanatory Success, that we have strong corroboration that God has acted just as kenotic theism and axiarchism predict so that we can be confident such types of action actually are the modus operandi of God in general. So, unless God has some countervailing reason to stray from this general practice one or more times (e.g. if there is something we need to know that cannot be read off of nature, or imbued into ‘her’ formational economy), we know that the prior probability of how and why God will act will be consistent with past actions that have already been corroborated.
LOVELINESS & THE DANGER OF ACCOMODATION— I think Dawes’s fundamental point is that precisely because we don’t know what it would mean to ‘hear’ God, or for God to ‘speak’ we also don't know what we should observe if such were actually the case. Such cases make alleged acts of God reported by the believer easy to wrongly accommodate precisely because of a lack of informativeness.
However, assuming that a personal interactive relationship with God is possible, and value-generating, there is no problem describing, predicting, and explaining what it would mean to ‘hear’ God, or how God would ‘speak’ to us from within the research programme of kenotic theism, and the auxiliary hypothesis of axiarchism. Specifically, we would predict a value-generating non-miraculous causal disposition within our brains that will have a proximate natural explanation and description of what is happening when we have such an experience, while also having a complementary and ultimate theistic explanation. This natural experience can be triggered by public revelation, good and beautiful aspects of creation, and the like. Indeed, there is a brand new field of study called neurotheology that Dawes can read if he would like to see how informative such a theistic research programme can be.
Even if theism is informative enough to predict that this is how God would act in a personal relationship, I think there is still the danger of accommodation. In order to be justified in these cases, we would appeal to the notion of a properly basic belief that is appropriately grounded (either by something like the Holy Spirit, or the context of the experience itself is appropriately grounding such a basic belief). Even still there is a danger of accommodation. Fortunately, there are two ways to corroborate these cases further.
First, review all my posts here and in my section on Paul Draper's work to see that theistic explanations not only can succeed, but have succeeded in showing that naturalism is very probably false partly because theism is very probably true. This will provide independent verification of one's religious experience within the theistic tradition of Christianity. This provides powerful reason to think one's religious experience isn't spurious.
Second, I think this danger can be significantly mitigated by keeping in mind that any comforting and guiding from God that doesn’t fit well within the highly corroborated research programme of kenotic theism, and the auxiliary hypothesis of a value-generating universe will have a very low prior probability in the absence of countervailing evidence. So, if somebody claims that God has comforted them after murdering innocent people, we know such a claim is spurious. Or again, if somebody claims that God is guiding them to commit adultery, we know such a claim is false.
But as I say, I am not sure that all things considered, such experiences are, all by themselves, that improbable on atheism because of the experiences of competing religious adherents, even though they are probable on theism (the fact that our nervous system is disposed to form such beliefs is very probable on theism). This is a different danger of accommodation than the one Dawes hones in on relating to informativeness. In any case, theistic explanations can still be very informative for the reasons I have argued, even within the domain of religious experience. Whether or not such religious experiences also constitute significant evidence in favor of theism over naturalism is a separate question. If we don't keep them separate then we would be confusing two different problems: the loveliness of theistic explanations in general, and the explanatory power of theistic explanations on our total evidence for religious experience in particular. Even if the loveliest explanation for religious experience is a theistic one, that doesn’t mean that the likeliest explanation for religious experience isn’t an atheistic one when we consider other known facts that might have more explanatory power on the assumption that atheism is true. In any case, the description, prediction and explanation behind the questions of how and why God would act in the world can be answered in a lovely and informative manner.
CONCLUSION
Kenotic theism coupled with axiarchism is a much lovelier explanation than naturalism or atheism. This is primarily due to the fact that kenotic theism and axiarchism gives us something like a robust set of social norms for mathematically describing, complementarily explaining, and empirically predicting what God would do, and how God would do it without the need for ascribing mental predicates to God. Naturalism on the other hand is the relatively uninformative hypothesis that the physical is ontologically prior to the mental.
While theistic explanations of publicly accessible events, states of affairs, and singular and general causes are highly informative, there is a danger of accommodation for those who report having a private experience of God wherein they think God is comforting them, and guiding them. However, the success of kenotic theistic explanations in general, and axiarchism can significantly decrease this danger so that all things considered, theistic explanations of all types have an adequate degree of informativeness.
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