Liz Jackson on Romans 1

Liz Jackson writes ("Permissivism About Religious Belief", https://philpapers.org/rec/JACPAR-11):

 

In Romans 1:20, St. Paul writes, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—God’s eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” Given passages like this one, those in the Christian tradition might argue that theism is not a permissive case. Paul seems to be arguing God is clearly seen from creation (and in a later passage, the moral law). From this, some conclude that theistic belief is rationally required of most or all of us, given the evidence.

 

In reply, my arguments in this chapter are consistent with a relatively straightforward reading of Paul in this passage (and similar passages). In Paul’s time, people had drastically different evidence that more clearly pointed toward theism. When Paul was writing, belief in God and/or the supernatural was extremely common and widespread (perhaps the divine hiddenness problem wouldn’t have gained much traction in the first century!) People spent much more time in nature, staring at starry skies and breathtaking sunsets; today, much more time is spent walking around concrete jungles and staring at computer screens. Furthermore, as Charles Taylor (2017) argues, the Reformation, Enlightenment, and Romanticism involved deep cultural and intellectual transformations that gave rise to a much more secular society. My arguments in this chapter regard our current evidential situation, and while I maintain that permissivism about theism is supported by the widespread historical disagreement about God’s existence, I don’t claim that permissivism about theistic belief extends to all historical periods, places, and times.

 

I see a few issues with this response to Romans 1. First, Christians usually believe in some form of inerrancy and inspiration: Because the Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit, anything it teaches to be true is true. (I acknowledge Randal Rauser's thesis of providential errantism and set that aside.) Combine this with the interpretation that Paul is teaching us that those with non-belief are without excuse and you arrive at the interpretation that this is an inspired and therefore inerrant teaching of the Bible.

 

Even if Paul is saying something from the point of view of his time and place, the Holy Spirit can inspire teachings that are applicable well into the future, and modern Christians usually see themselves as reading something that was in a sense meant for them. Very few Christians, in fact this is probably a heresy, see the Bible as a fossil or snapshot of a particular time and place—this would basically be a rejection of inspiration.

 

There's two aspects of the Holy Spirit view of scripture: The Holy Spirit guides the authors of the Bible to write from their own perspective in a way that includes layers of meaning and timeless truths applicable to future generations, and the Holy Spirit guides the modern Christian to the knowledge that a particular interpretation of a passage applies to the modern Christian and their life despite the gap in time and culture. Viewing the Bible as a fossil would mean to jettison both aspects of the Holy Spirit view of scripture. So a very natural and Christian way of interpreting Romans 1 is that its teaching applies for all time.

 

Second, Paul says since the creation of the world . . . from what has been made . . . This kind of language has a universality to it. We look at the time interval from the creation of the world to Paul's time; Paul says God's attributes have been obvious in that interval. It would be strange for God's attributes to be obvious for such a long interval, but suddenly change in the comparatively negligible interval of Paul's time to ours. (And sure, Paul's phrasing of "since creation" need not be literal, but this applies even if we think of it as "since human civilization" or "since humans began believing in gods".)

 

Plus, if God's attributes are made obvious by "what has been made", then there is no relevant difference from Paul's time to ours. Paul is surely citing objects of creation like the starry sky, the planets, the trees, the animals, the sun and moon, and humanity. We have all these today, but it's not at all obvious that any of this were made by a perfectly loving God. For some of us, it's painfully obvious that a perfectly loving God almost certainly does not exist because of what has been made: death, war, disease, murder, poverty, and so on. While Christians view these as accidents of sin, for some of us it's apparent that the systems of our world systematically produce these evils. This is perhaps most apparent with the evils of evolution, and the predation, starvation, parasitism, and mass amounts of death it took to create us.

 

If anything, because we have more rigorous philosophical arguments for God from fine-tuning, the inference from "what has been made" to God's existence should be more powerful than ever, and so all the more are modern humans without excuse in their non-belief in God. And yet we also have more rigorous philosophical arguments from evil, and for some of us the problem of evil trumps the argument from fine-tuning, and it's not a remotely close contest.

 

Third, what Paul says is arguably false even in his own time. For much of human history, humans believed in multiple gods, and didn't necessarily believe in a singular all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good creator. So it's just not true that most groups of people have clearly seen the workings of a singular God; many, maybe most, interpret creation as the workings of multiple gods.

 

Plus, even for Jewish people and Christians, who both believe in a singular God, they strongly disagree who this God is. Christians believe Jesus is God incarnate, while Jewish people strongly disagree. Even Christians disagree among themselves, with some being viewing the Holy Spirit as a person in some sense separate from the Father and Son, and others viewing the Holy Spirit as something more like a force or essence that is not separate from the Father or Son; or some viewing Jesus as purely man while others view Jesus as both man and divine. How many heresies were there in the first few centuries leading up to the Councils and Creeds?

 

Even if you extend the idea of God to the Greeks like Plato and Aristotle, it's obvious from the Greek texts that this conception of God is radically different from the God that Christians believe.

 

God’s eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen by whom? By Christians? After all, if the conception of God or gods is radically different between cultures, and Christians are the only ones who got it right, then it's not true that since the creation of the world God's attributes have been known. It's only thanks to the events of the Old Testament and the recent events of the Gospels that we now know the more important attributes of God, namely that God incarnated and died for our sins.

 

Because Christians made up a tiny minority in Paul's time, Paul must have had a broader understanding of God. But if that's right, then Paul is not speaking from this local perspective, but is speaking universally; God's eternal power and divine nature have been seen by everyone, so that everyone is without excuse [in their non-belief of God's existence]. Why assume that Paul make an exception for future generations? And if you're not assuming this, then you grant that Paul could be, for all you know, applying what he's saying to future generations too. Regardless, God's eternal power and divine nature, even in some broad sense, haven't been seen by everyone. That's just a mistake.

 

But putting Paul's mistakes aside, the question is whether Romans 1 commits Christians to an impermissivistic viewpoint about the rationality of belief in God, and there's an interpretation where yes, it does, and this interpretation appears at least as solid as any other.

A proof against God's existence from evil would explain the sociological data

I heard the recent story of Noelia Castillo, a woman who died in Spain at 25 years old from euthanasia. She was sexually assaulted multiple times, and became paralyzed after a suicide attempt. (https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/26/europe/euthanasia-spain-noelia-castillo-latam-intl)

My argument from unbearable suffering is a suggested proof against God's existence. Proofs either for or against God's existence do not fare well in the history of ideas; they always fail to generate any kind of consensus among experts that God either must or must not exist. So chasing after proofs about God might seem like a wild goose chase.

And yet here is reason to chase after proofs. There is a strong, deep, global intuition that there is a tension between God and the evils we see.

Someone might be tempted to cite global statistics on belief in God and show that this tension must not be that strong, because a significant percentage of humans believe in God. But this statistic does not show how many of these believers are nominal, how many will come to lose faith, how many are struggling with doubts caused by evil, how many are engaging in self-deception or believe because of the comfort these beliefs bring in the face of evil.

Plus, we see religiosity dying in Western countries, and we see an inverse relationship between level of education and religiosity. This is what we expect to see if it were the case that God does not exist and if belief in God were ultimately a superstition sustained by a lack of awareness of facts about our world, and a lack of careful, critical thought – things cured by education.

When we look to the intellectual world, we see much more widespread disbelief in God. Within the intellectual world, but also very much outside of it, we see this deep and encompassing force, like a gravity, that the problem of evil exudes, pushing down belief in God.

The question is: Why does this broad, deep, powerful intuition that God and evil are incompatible exist? There are two general answers: Either this force comes from a place of widespread confusion, or comes from the truth.

I doubt this Zeitgeist comes from a place of widespread confusion. One reason why is because of how intimately familiar we are of pain and happiness. We have vivid experiences of pain and happiness. Goodness and badness are constant, everyday, familiar concepts. Another sociological fact is found in the perceived failure of theodicies and the failure of responses to evil. Even theists often remark about how poor the responses to evil and divine hiddenness are, and acknowledge how there are evils that are resistant to go-to theodicies of free will and soul-making.

Why are things like this? Why is the problem of evil so compelling? Why are responses to the problem of evil so embarrassing?

Here's an explanation: Because the problem of evil proves that God does not exist, and this wide and deep gravity that pervades everything has as its source this proof, whatever and wherever it is.

Peter Unger, "An Argument for Skepticism"

Unger's general strategy in this paper is the following:

 

Knowledge > Certainty > Severe characterization > Unreasonable.

 

That is, knowledge claims are claims of certainty, and under the severe characterization of certainty, certainty is dogmatic and unreasonable. So knowledge claims are always unreasonable.

 

I might be inclined to accept that knowledge claims are claims of certainty, and to accept that certainty under the severe characterization is unreasonable. And yet I think knowledge claims are fine. So I must give something up, and one place to look is whether the severe characterization is accurate. Unger states:

 

". . . one's being absolutely certain of something involves one in having a certain severely negative attitude in the matter of whether that thing is so: the attitude that no new information, evidence or experience which one might ever have will be seriously considered by one to be at all relevant to any possible change in one's thinking in the matter."

 

There are two separate questions here: what certainty is and when it's okay to be certain. To the latter, we might say that if the denial of p entails p, then it's okay to be certain that p. And we might say that if p is necessarily true, then it's okay to be certain that p. But this doesn't answer the first question of what does it look like to be certain of something.

 

(I've heard the distinction made between 'epistemic certainty' and 'psychological certainty', but I'll set that aside. I'll also set aside questions about what it means to believe or to have credence.) 

 

Here's a less severe characterization of certainty: I am certain that p just in case I cannot imagine p being false. This doesn't entail a dogmatic attitude, because I am open to the idea that you could change my imagination regarding p if it's really the case that you can imagine p being false. In other words, I am open to my imagination becoming like yours.

 

Now, Unger has something to say in response to this: That I basically just admitted that I'm not absolutely certain of p. After all, if I were absolutely certain of p, then I should say that there's no chance of my imagination being changed such that I come to believe differently about p. If I say there is a possibility that my imagination could be transformed such that I now see that p is false, then I admit that there is some possibility of p being false, which is to admit that I'm not absolutely certain that p is true.

 

And this exposes the commonsense definition of certainty: to be certain that p is to believe that there is a zero percent chance of p being false, or P(~p) = 0.00.

 

But the idea of psychological probability feels vague in my mind. "There is a zero percent chance of p being false to me" – What does this mean? Maybe it means, among other things: I cannot imagine p being false.

 

My response is that there are many beliefs where apparently not only can I not imagine them being false, but no one can. So if my imagination were to be changed to be like that of anyone else's, I still would not be able to imagine p being false. So this gives me the best of both worlds: I keep both my certainty and my open-mindedness. By being certain that p, I admit nothing more than that I cannot imagine p being false, but I can be open to my imagination being changed if you can imagine p being false. If you can't, then it turns out that it's not possible for my imagination to change such that I now see that p is false, at least with respect to your imagination. If no one can imagine p being false, then it turns out that it's not possible for my imagination to change such that I now see that p is false with respect to anyone's imagination.

 

The key is that I'm not assuming that there really is a chance that p is false, and that someone out there sees that p is possibly false; for all I know, no one can, has, or ever will see that p is false exactly because p cannot be false. You can't know what's not true. So if it's not true that p is possibly false, then you can't know that p is possibly false. And if you can't know that p is possibly false, then you can't see that p is possibly false. And if you can't see that p is possibly false, then you can't imagine p being false. So if p cannot be false, then you cannot imagine p being false.

 

Side note:

 

***

 

I would apply this to belief in God. We might say, initially, that we can imagine both God existing and God not existing. But if we buy the logic of ontological arguments, it will turn out either that God must exist or cannot exist. So it will turn out that p cannot be false where p is either "God exists" or "God does not exist".

 

My response is that we cannot imagine God existing if God cannot exist, or we cannot imagine God not existing if God must exist. This is not strange; many people claim to know God on a personal level, or claim to know that God exists. If it turns out that God cannot exist, then these claims will be retrospectively mistaken, just like claims about the imaginability of God will be retrospectively mistaken if God turns out to be an impossible being.

 

To give an illustration of this, let's say there's a race of beings who think they can imagine a square circle existing or not existing, and without reason to believe one side over the other, they are agnostic about square circles. One day they realize that square circles are impossible, and so they realize that they actually weren't successfully imagining square circles existing; they just couldn't yet see the impossibility of them.

 

This is where the distinction between 'epistemic possibility' and 'metaphysical possibility' is brought up: the existence of a square circle was epistemically possible to these people even while metaphysically impossible. Likewise, God's existence or non-existence can be impossible without our epistemic access to that impossibility.

 

This suggests that imagination is a success term: it's not enough to take oneself to be imagining something; you have to succeed in imagining it in some sense.

 

And maybe this implies that there are layers of imaginability, because if God turns out to be impossible and thus unimaginable, then what were believers doing while believing in and thinking about God? Either they were imagining something that is possible and incorrectly calling that God, or they were imagining something impossible, but in some superficial sense.

 

I suspect that all objects of imagination are impossible, but this comes out of my suspicion that necessitarianism is true. Only objects of experience, which are actual, are possible. Even if you imagine something and it comes to pass, what you imagine is only a rough approximation of what really comes to pass; it never could be that your vision exactly comes to pass. Same with imagining things that you know happened but weren't there to see yourself, or even with things you remember. If you remember perfectly, then it's not an object of imagination, but of experience. If you remember imperfectly, then the imperfections are products of your imagination, and thus that past event didn't happen exactly like that.

 

One thing that pulls my intuition in this direction is the fact that our imagination never has the perfect fidelity that reality has, and so for reality to truly match perfectly with our imagination, it would have to be just as fuzzy and missing in the details, which is impossible. But if this is right, then while imagination might succeed in the sense of approximating reality, it never truly succeeds. But I guess imagination as a success term was never about accurately representing reality, but rather successfully combining properties in the mind. Incoherent things can never be successfully imagined exactly because the presence of one property means the lack of the other, so the two can never be combined in the mind. So imagination can be plenty successful in this way while still producing impossible objects and events. Incoherence needn't be the only source of impossibility; nomological impossibility is another. But even if all impossibility ends up being incoherence, incompatible properties could be successfully combined in the mind due to a failure to grasp the incompatibility. Right, it's not like God's impossibility is easy to see, lest the epistemic environment be completely different to what we see. The incompatibility is only visible, the failure of imagination only occurs, when the properties are explicitly contradictory. 

 

But doesn't belief depend on imagination? Are all our beliefs technically false in this case? No, because if we allow degrees of truth, then many beliefs of ours will be practically true. Setting degrees of truth to the side, propositional beliefs that contain nothing but first-person data would still be certainly true, as they are beliefs that map perfectly onto experience. If you say that beliefs that contain nothing but first-person properties must be non-propositional, and if you allow  non-propositional beliefs, then these beliefs would still be certainly true. 

 

Side note 2:

 

Because p's being false's being impossible entails that it cannot be imagined, my inability to imagine p being false is evidence that p cannot be false. This gets tricky if I have epistemic peers who say they can imagine p being false. If these peers are nowhere to be found, then quickly the best explanation for why we cannot imagine p being false becomes because p cannot be false.

 

*** 

 

I'm just giving a simple conditional: If there really is someone who can truly imagine p being false, then, and only then, could my imagination in theory become like theirs and I have a change of mind; but even then I will remain unable to imagine p being false until my imagination has been so changed. But if it turns out that no one can truly imagine p being false, then the antecedent isn't true, and we are all stuck unable to imagine p being false. I'm being no more dogmatic than everyone else in that case.

 

This then hinges on what it means to imagine a proposition being true or false. For example, could someone imagine...

 

p = at least one thing exists.

 

...being false?

 

Let's say someone says, "Yes, I can imagine it turning out that nothing at all exists, not even one thing. I can imagine that I am guilty of a verbal mistake and confused about the verb 'exists', and it turns out that nothing does it. So I can imagine p being false."

 

Either this person is lying, mistaken, or telling the truth. I cannot imagine p being false here, so I'm stuck with my certainty that p is true. This means I also cannot imagine it being the case that this person is telling the truth.

 

But if this person is right, and they really can imagine p being false, then I grant the possibility of my imagination becoming like theirs and me having a change of mind. But if they are lying or mistaken, then there might be no such possibility, and if it's the case that anyone who similarly claims to be able to imagine p being false is also lying or mistaken, then there is no such possibility at all.

 

This way I keep both my certainty and open-mindedness. If anything, this appears less dogmatic than skepticism because it's open to certainty.

Matthew Shea: God and Happiness (Cambridge Elements, 2024) – 1.2

Note 1: Shea defines happiness as follows (pg 3):

The concept of happiness that I will use throughout this Element is the classical one that corresponds to what contemporary philosophers often call “well-being,” “welfare,” or “flourishing.” It does not mean being happy in the sense of having a cheerful personality or feeling subjectively content. Instead, it means leading a happy life. It is not an emotion or mood, but a state or way of living.

When I use the term ‘happiness’, I am referring to intrinsic goodness, which is a positive (as in ontologically positive, but also positively valenced), felt experience. So on my view, one cannot be happy while unconscious. But one can be flourishing while unconscious. A good night’s rest, or an opportune nap, is part of flourishing, and yet often entails unconsciousness. Often the word ‘pleasure’ is used where I use ‘happiness’, but I feel like ‘pleasure’ is too tangled up with notions of carnal pleasure. It doesn’t help that the view I hold—that happiness is the sole intrinsic good—is referred to in the literature as ‘hedonism’, a word tangled up with debauchery. Even though happiness is the sole intrinsic good, there are many different kinds of intrinsically good experiences, and so there are many different kinds of happiness.

Note 2: Shea says (pg 3) that his notion of happiness is a normative concept. What makes it normative? Apparently because happiness evaluates a person’s life as good or bad.

I do not view goodness or badness as normative. To me, normativity applies to oughts and shoulds. But whether something ought to be the case always, in my view, depends on a goal. And because different intrinsic goods can further different goals, there is no conceptual connection between goodness/badness and ‘should’, and so goodness and badness are not normative concepts.

For example, if a man is made happy by acting violently, then while it’s true that this happiness is intrinsically good, it doesn’t follow that this happiness ought to be. If someone’s goal is to maximize happiness, then happiness that depends on the suffering of others might fail to further this goal. And if someone’s goal is to maximize virtuous happiness, with the understanding that happiness that depends on the pointless suffering of others is not virtuous, then this sort of evil happiness clearly fails to further this goal.

Note 3: Shea writes (pg 3):

A different and popular sense of happiness takes it to be a state of mind like subjective satisfaction or positive emotions and feelings, a purely descriptive psychological condition that is not value laden. By contrast, happiness in my sense is a good: something that has positive value and is desirable and worthy of pursuit, promotion, and protection.

It appears that there’s a difference here in how I use the term ‘value’. Taking after Nevin Climenhaga, I use ‘value’ and ‘goodness’ interchangeably. I’m not sure what ‘value laden’ means here, but happiness, as I use the term, is a state of consciousness (not necessarily a state of mind if states of mind include non-conscious or subconscious states; happiness is an active conscious state in my view), and a feeling or experience, and is absolutely “value laden” in the sense of, well, being valuable, or good.

The “by contrast” bit seems to imply that the view that happiness is something felt somehow precludes happiness from being a good. Just the opposite: happiness’s being felt is what allows it to be intrinsically good.

So far, there are differences in how I understand the terms happiness, normativity, value, and good.

I remember that ‘eudaimonia’ is sometimes translated as ‘happiness’ in Plato, and so that could be where Shea is getting this usage from, but I think this is confusing. Eudaimonia is better translated as ‘flourishing’, and so what Shea calls ‘happiness’ I would call ‘flourishing’, and even then I’m sure that my preferred conception of flourishing would differ in some ways. To signify this, I will replace ‘happiness’ when Shea uses it with [flourishing] in brackets.

Note 4: Shea writes that [flourishing] is intrinsically good (pg 4). But on my view, flourishing is extrinsically good. To flourish is something like: to live as part of a system that maximizes good happiness and good pain and minimizes evil happiness and evil pain. Only happiness is intrinsically good, and flourishing is a state of optimized happiness.

 

We can also refer to good happiness as ‘virtuous happiness’, good pain as ‘virtuous pain’, evil happiness as ‘vicious happiness’, and evil pain as ‘vicious pain’. The idea is that the kind of happiness that leads to greater long-term happiness for yourself and those around you is virtuous – it doesn’t compromise your character, and is the kind of happiness of which a virtuous person would approve.

Note 5: Apparently Richard Taylor defines [flourishing] as:

“having achieved fulfillment or having been blessed with the highest personal good . . . the kind of good that normally takes a lifetime to attain.”

But on my view ataraxia, a deep sense of existential peace and contentment, is the highest personal good. Ataraxia is difficult to achieve, but, the idea goes, the longer someone spends in eudaimonia, or something close to eudaimonia, the more likely it is that they will achieve it. And so while eudaimonia is a great good, it is ultimately subservient to the even greater goal of achieving ataraxia for as many people as possible.

Note 6: Shea makes a distinction between something being intrinsically good for someone versus something being intrinsically good period. Something can make “the world a better place even if it has no relation to any individual.” This is impossible on my view. The concept of ‘better’ is ultimately phenomenal, just like the concept of goodness more generally. So it’s impossible for something to be better without being better for someone. Nothing is magically good; all good things are good for a reason. To say that something can be good in a vacuum sounds to me like saying that it’s good for no reason. The phrase “good for nothing” applies here. If something is good for nothing then it’s not good.

Note 7: Because there are four types of goodness on my view (intrinsic, extrinsic, saving, and success), a person’s life can be good in different ways. But I imagine the child in the story of Omelas, the one being tortured so that the city’s inhabitants can flourish. This child does not live a good life. No sane person wants to live this child’s life. And yet the child’s life does, in the magical context of the story, produce a great deal of goodness for others. The child’s life is not good for the child, but it is good for others. So the child has a useful life, though not a good life. This tells me that, for me, a good life and a useful life are not the same thing. The basic notion of ‘good life’ thus requires that the life be good for the person who lives it. If your life is painful enough, it’s perfectly rational to reject your own life even if your life is highly useful for others. 

Note 8: Moral goodness, on my view, refers to the goodness of someone’s character and moral reasoning. Moral goodness does not occupy some additional category of goodness, but is a particular type of extrinsic good, good because good character and good reasoning leads to greater and better happiness and less suffering.

Note 9: Shea shares this quote from Julia Annas:

“As we bring up our children, what we aim for is not that they have episodes of smiley-face feeling, but that their lives go well as wholes: we come to think happiness as the way a life as a whole goes well, and see that episodes of happiness are not what we build our lives around.”

I observe that we build our lives around running away from pain, especially unbearable pain: pain so great that it makes us wish we weren’t alive. Pains we run away from include the pain of boredom, the pain of disappointing a parent or mentor, the pain of the judgment of others, the pain of poverty, the pain of low self-esteem, and so on.

But I want to turn to this notion of “life as a whole going well.” I’m not sure what to make of this. Very simply, a life with more happiness than pain can be said to be at least technically a happy life, a life that has gone well, even if only barely. But some kinds of happiness are more prized than others. A life filled with more happiness than pain might be worse off on the whole compared to a life with more pain than happiness, if the latter contains more of these prized forms of happiness. A boring-but-decent life is arguably less desirable than a troubled-but-magnificent life. Put another way, higher-order happiness is so great that a life filled with only lower pains and pleasures where the pleasures slightly outweigh the pains is not as worth living as a life with higher-order pains and pleasures where the pains slightly outweigh the pleasures.

 

So when comparing the magnitude of pains versus pleasures, we take into account the context of the pain or pleasure. We don't want to play with children's toys forever, even if that meant freedom from the greater pains of life; we want to take part in greater narratives, in projects that go beyond ourselves and have a broader and deeper impact on the world, and we are willing to sacrifice much comfort for that opportunity. 

 

This idea of “smiley-face feeling” – like the pleasures of entertainment and food and traveling and so on – seems to speak to a kind of shallow happiness. We don’t want that for our children. We want our children to experience deep, profound happiness. That’s where ataraxia comes in. I don’t want to go to a soulless job, go home, eat dinner, listen to a podcast or watch some mildly entertaining show, go to bed, and repeat until I die. That sounds bland, shallow, pointless, stupid, disgusting – a waste of life. What I want is to do the kind of work I find most urgent – work so urgent, and so important, that it’s worth suffering for, even dying for – work so meaningful that if I managed to complete it, at least to a decent enough degree, the self-satisfaction I would feel would be so great that I would no longer find myself raging against death and suffering, but accepting it, because I’m grateful to have had the chance to do the work even if it meant being forced to live in a world that’s in many ways deeply bad.

Note 10: Because flourishing is an extrinsic good, and a saving good, I understand what makes it good. So I can explain why flourishing is good. Shea on the other hand has not yet explained why flourishing is good, or what it means for something to be good in the first place, or what flourishing looks like. On his view, flourishing is intrinsically good, which is a departure from my view. On my view the only thing that can be intrinsically good is something of which one cannot seriously ask why someone would want it without failing to grasp its essence. The only thing that fits the bill is conscious, positive, felt experience, and I call this sort of experience happiness. (As GE Moore pointed out, you can always ask, “But why is that thing good?” This is why I believe that the reason why something is good must terminate in an essence fact: intrinsic goodness is good by its essence. No one who grasps the essence of happiness can seriously ask why it's good.) Plus, I see that nothing would be good in a universe that forever was empty of conscious subjects, and this tells me that whatever goodness is, it must cash out in conscious experience.

Matthew Shea: God and Happiness (Cambridge Elements, 2024) – 1.1

Here Matthew Shea shares a number of quotes about happiness. My text is in white, Shea's text and text in brackets and ellipses and citations are in blue, and the text of other authors is in yellow.

 

Plato: [there is no] need to ask why a man desires happiness; the answer is already final. (1956: 205a)

Aristotle: Verbally there is very general agreement [about the final end and highest good of human life]; for both the general run of men and people of superior refinement say that it is happiness, and identify living well and faring well with being happy. (1984: Bk. I, 1095a)

Cicero: The entire end and aim of philosophy is the attainment of happiness; and desire for happiness is the sole motive that has led men to engage in this study. (1931: 177)

Seneca: To live happily . . . is the desire of all men. (2007: 41)

Augustine: We all certainly desire to live happily; and there is no human being but assents to this statement almost before it is made. (1887b: Ch. 3)

Boethius: All anxieties of mortal men, driven on by the exertions of uncountably diverse pursuits, travel along paths that are, to be sure, quite different; yet they all strive to reach only one single goal: true happiness. (2001: Bk. III, Prose 2)
 

According to Anselm of Canterbury, the desire for happiness is a natural and inescapable inclination of the human will. (pg 1) 

Aquinas: man's last end is happiness, which all men desire | man must, of necessity, desire all, whatsoever he desires, for the last end (1920: I-II, q. 1, a. 8, 6)

Joseph Butler: Every man hath a general desire of his own happiness. (1983: 47)

Immanuel Kant: There is one end that can be presupposed as actual in all rational beings . . . and that is the purpose of happiness. (2012: 4, 415)

John Stuart Mill: Each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness . . . . [H]uman nature is so constituted as to desire nothing which is not either a part of happiness or a means of happiness. (2001: 35, 39)

Pascal: All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. However different the means they may employ, they all strive towards this goal. The reason why some go to war and some do not is the same desire in both, but interpreted in two different ways. The will never takes the least step except to that end. This is the motive of every act of man, including those who go and hang themselves.

 

Yet for very many years no one without faith has ever reached the goal at which everyone is continually aiming. All men complain: princes, subjects, nobles, commoners, old, young, strong, weak, learned, ignorant, healthy, sick, in every country, at every time, of all ages, and all conditions . . . What else does this craving, and this helplessness proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words, by God himself. (1995: No. 148)

 

Plato: A man should make all haste to escape from earth to heaven; and escape means becoming as like God as possible . . . .[T]here are two patterns set up in reality. One is divine and supremely happy; the other has nothing of God in it and is the pattern of the deepest unhappiness. (1990: 176a5–e4)

Augustine: Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee. (2006: Bk. I, Ch. 1)

 

For references, see: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/god-and-happiness/3AE254B4E1330CA1C8B2D8D68F79459B. 

I will add a quote from Nietzche. This is from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, near the end of the book, at the end of the Drunken Song (79): 

Nietzche: Oh man! Take heed of what the dark midnight says: I slept, I slept—from deep dreams I awoke: The world is deep—and more profound than day would have thought. Profound in her pain—Pleasure—more profound than pain of heart, Woe speaks; pass on. But all pleasure seeks eternity—a deep and profound eternity. 

Translation by Udo Middelmann, as quoted in How Should We Then Live? by Francis Schaeffer. Fleming H. Revell Company, 1976. Page 169.

Another translation, by Thomas Common:

O man!
Take heed!
What saith deep midnight’s voice indeed?
“I slept my sleep—,”
“From deepest dream I’ve woke, and plead:—“
“The world is deep,”
“And deeper than the day could read.”
“Deep is its woe—,”
“Joy—deeper still than grief can be:”
“Woe saith: Hence! Go!”
“But joys all want eternity—,”
“—Want deep, profound eternity!”

Matthew Shea: God and Happiness (Cambridge Elements, 2024) – Abstract

Shea, Matthew. God and Happiness. Cambridge University Press, 2024.

 

My responses will be in white text while the author's words will be in blue.

 
This book has the following five chapters:
 

1) The Concept of Happiness
 
2) The Nature of Happiness
 
3) The Content and Structure of Happiness
 
4) The Possibility of Happiness
 
5) The Hope of Happiness 

 
Abstract: 
 

This Element explores the connection between God and happiness . . . it argues that God's existence has significant, positive, and desirable implications for human happiness.

Part 1: God's existence versus belief in God's existence
 
Let's separate out two questions: First, would God's existence make things better? Second, would my belief in God's existence make things better for me? 
 
To the first question, what could be more obviously true than that a perfect being would make things better? A perfect being would, necessarily, be the foundation of the universe. And if the universe has a perfect foundation, then the universe results from and thus is part of that perfection. And so, if perfection has been instantiated, then we live in a fundamentally perfect world.
 
If God does not exist, then all bets are off; the universe could be as uncaring about our suffering as we could imagine, and so we could imagine living in a nightmare world for eternity with no God to rescue us. Only the presence of a perfect being guarantees that we won't be stuck in a nightmare world like this. So not only would God make things maximally better compared to a godless world, but only God can ensure that things aren't maximally bad for anyone.
 
Saying God makes things better is thus almost like saying the make-things-better-person makes things better. Even if a merely highly excellent, highly virtuous, highly powerful person were to exist, then this would entail great improvements to our world. And yet God is maximally excellent, maximally virtuous, and maximally powerful, and thus entails maximum improvements to our world. So I can't understand why someone would try to argue that God's existence would make things worse off, or would make no difference. 

(I do wonder about Graham Oppy's argument that impossible things cannot coherently make a difference, and because God is impossible, the question of what difference would God make is an incoherent question.)
 
Maybe one reason why naturalists are surprisingly hostile to pro-theism (the view that God would make things better and thus we ought to want God to exist) is perhaps because we need to separate out the improvements God would make to the world from the improvements my belief in God would make to my life.
 
It's on this second question that I turn more anti-theist. First, I think doxastic involuntarism is true: We can't choose to believe what we believe, we simply find ourselves believing things or not believing them according to what makes sense to us. So even if it were the case that my belief in God would improve my life, I might not be capable of believing in God because of, say, my analysis of the problem of evil.
 
Second, it's easy to argue that my belief in God would make my life significantly worse. Indeed, I lost my belief in God because of how painful holding onto that belief became.
 
That pain has two components: The intellectual component, and the emotional component.
 
The intellectual component is this: It's painful trying to believe in God when there are a barrage of arguments against belief in God. This is made especially worse when you believe in the God of Christianity, because not only do you have to face arguments against the coherence of a perfect being, but now you have to deal with difficult Bible verses and Christian doctrines.
 
Matters are made worse still if you feel obligated as a Christian to not only believe in God, but to believe in God with certainty. When faith is a virtue, doubt is a sin, and so having any doubt in God's existence can be seen as a moral failure in Christian culture. After all, how can one be regenerated by and filled with the Holy Spirit and yet still have doubts?
 
But if Christians are committed to being certain in their beliefs, that means that non-Christians need not argue that Christianity is false, but only that it might be false. But not only do naturalists argue that Christianity might be false, they argue that Christianity is clearly false. Some naturalists, like Georges Rey, argue that Christianity is so clearly false that Christians must be engaging in self-deception; even Christians don't really believe, they just lie to themselves and say they do so they can fit into their social environment and combat anxieties over death and morality.
 
The emotional component of the pain of belief in God comes from what happens when you love God and want to be with God but find yourself in a godless world. The more I loved God and wanted to be with God, the more painful it felt to live day in and day out in a world that doesn't believe in God, that doesn't respect belief in God, that holds no tangible, undeniable evidence of God, and in which the silence of God in the face of horrendous suffering is deafening.
 
It was during these moments that I started thinking about virtuous despair. In the Christian world, love is the greatest virtue, and loving God above all else is the most important quality in a virtuous person. So loving God is a virtue, and yet loving God brings despair, because the more you love God, the more painful the godlessness of the world becomes, and the more absurd it feels to live in a godless world day after day after day. So this despair is caused by virtue.
 
It's important to highlight the day after day aspect of this; the hours accumulate and accumulate, and the days and years pile on. But what are we doing with this time? Seeing God? Seeing God's great works throughout the world? Seeing any sign of God, or spending any time with God in any undeniable, tangible sort of way? No. As the hours accumulate, the time spent apart from God accumulates too. The more you love God, the more agonizing these God-empty hours become.

(This reminds me of the Problem of Relationship: God creates us to relate in a number of ways: sight, sound, touch, conversation, assistance, etc., and proceeds to relate to us in zero of those ways.)
 
So while it might be true that "God's existence has significant, positive, and desirable implications for human happiness", it's not true that my belief in God will bring me happiness. To the contrary, my belief in God brought me agony.
 
Part 2: Absurdity of life without God?
 
If God's existence has significant, positive, and desirable implications for human happiness, then doesn't it follow that God's non-existence has significant, negative, and undesirable implications for human happiness?
 
I think this is right, and I accept that there is a great deal of pessimism in my naturalism in contrast to my previous Christian worldview. But I argue for a mitigated pessimism that makes room for optimism, even deep optimism in the face of death and the injustice, and suffering of our world.
 
I've written on the topic of the absurdity of life without God, where I've stated that I used to think that the absurdity of life without God is an ace-in-the-hole argument against naturalism, and that I have since changed my views completely and now argue that there is no intellectual or practical problem of meaning for naturalism, and even if there were, Christianity would be of no use in solving it seeing that it is a false worldview. So if one of the book's theses is that there is a problem for naturalism, say, along the lines of what Yujin Nagasawa argues for in his recent book The Problem of Evil for Atheists, or what William Lane Craig argues for in his book Reasonable Faith, then I will take issue with Shea's views.
 
I take issue regardless because I think that one could, ironically, levy problems of meaning and happiness against Christian belief as discussed above, though I have more to say specifically about how Christian beliefs can threaten the meaningfulness of our existence.

My views have changed indeed.

Reacting to Josh Rasmussen, "From Fundamentality to Perfection"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVaYeX0U7As 

 

https://joshualrasmussen.com/secret_files/fundamentality.pdf

 

Response 1: The Ceiling Problem

 

Speaking to Objection 3 in the paper:

I can imagine a being that knows the future. This being has greater power than a being that does not know the future. But I can also imagine knowledge of the future turning out to be impossible, say, because the future is open.

 

Let's say knowledge of the future turns out to be impossible. So a being with future knowledge is an impossible being. Impossible properties cannot be great-making properties. So the perfect being, because of its perfection, not in spite of it, lacks knowledge of the future. And yet, I can imagine, at least in a surface-level sense of imagination, a being with the power to know the future. And so lacking knowledge of the future appears to be a limit, but this "limit" turns out to be a perfection.

But doesn't this open the door for similar cases? What could appear initially to be a limit in love, power, goodness, etc., could turn out to be a perfection. Any initially apparent great-making property could turn out to be an impossible property, and therefore not great-making after all. So the perfect being could be, in a sense, indifferent, unloving, ignorant, weak, etc., with these limits being pseudo-limits like the pseudo-limit of lacking future knowledge (or the pseudo-limit of being unable to create a liftable-unliftable stone).

 

The perfect foundation of the universe could turn out to be gravely disappointing. We might call this a Low Ceiling Perfect Being (LCPB): A being with maximal possible great-making properties, but it turns out that the ceiling on those maximal possible great-making properties is much lower compared to what we can imagine, at least in a surface-level sense of imagination.

How can we tell limits apart from pseudo-limits? If I'm wrong about future knowledge being a great-making power, then how am I to trust my beliefs about what counts as a great-making power?

Here's a funny way to put it: Why would the perfect foundation be perfect in a way that makes me happy? Why couldn't it be perfect in a way that makes me miserable? Put another way, couldn't the perfect foundation be perfect in a way that does not conform to my personal ideal of a perfect being? Couldn't perfection turn out to be something disappointing?

Objection: Why is the ceiling there and not lower or higher? Sure, because the degree of each power is at the ceiling, the powers are maximal and non-arbitrary. But have all I've done is transfer the arbitrariness from the degrees to the ceilings?

Response: Even for a perfect being, there are ceilings for great-making properties. Why are those ceilings where they are? Because those ceilings are necessary. So both positions are in the same boat: explaining the ceilings by necessity.

Rebuttal: The ceilings are where they are for a perfect being because we cannot imagine a greater degree of power that the perfect being cannot possess.

Response: But we can: We can imagine a being with the power to know the future. But there could be an explanation for why knowledge of the future turns out to be impossible. Upon understanding this explanation, perhaps the idea of future knowledge would evaporate from our imagination. But even if it's true that the idea of future knowledge evaporates from our imagination upon understanding the impossibility of future knowledge, the fact remains that we experienced ourselves imagining a being with future knowledge, even if only in a surface-level sense of imagination. Lacking future knowledge still appeared to be a limit when it wasn't. For all I know, similar explanations lie waiting to evaporate from my imagination other initially apparent great-making properties. Maybe my idea of perfect love is impossible, and so a perfectly loving being turns out to be far less loving compared to what I can initially imagine.

Maybe my idea of love is not great-making at all, because in order to be loving (in the sense I understand) you must be a creature like us (maternal / paternal, thus part of an evolutionary process, thus dependent, etc.), and so a perfect being turns out to be not loving at all.

 

Response 2: The Begetting Problem

 

Wouldn't a perfect being only beget perfection? And since there can only be one perfect being, a perfect being would beget nothing.

 

A Low Ceiling Perfect Being addresses this problem: Because a LCPB has pseudo-limits, it's no surprise that it would produce things that are, per our preferences / imagination, imperfect. In other words, the LCPB is already imperfect per our preferences / imagination, so it's no surprise that an imperfect (per our preferences / imagination) foundation would produce imperfections (per our preferences / imagination).

 

So there is a distinction between preference-imperfection and something like metaphysical imperfection or limit-based imperfection. Something can be unlimited (perfect, in one sense) and yet against our preferences (imperfect, in another sense).

 

Response 3: The Distinguishability Problem

 

Two users in the comments on the YouTube video mention objections from distinguishability. UnholyLight says:

 

The issue with the “no limits” idea is that it solves one problem by creating another that is just as serious. The whole point is to remove the need for explanation by stripping away any boundaries that would make you ask “why this and not something else.” But those boundaries are also exactly what give something explanatory power in the first place. They are what let you say why one outcome happens instead of another.

If you take that seriously and remove all limits, what you are left with has no specific structure, no constraints, no particular way it is. And if it has no particular way it is, then it cannot explain why the world looks the way it does. It cannot account for why these laws exist, or why this kind of universe exists rather than some completely different one. There is nothing in it that selects or grounds anything specific.

So it feels like the view gets stuck in a dilemma. If the foundation has limits, then those limits themselves call for explanation. But if it has no limits, then it becomes too indeterminate to explain anything at all. It avoids needing an explanation, but at the cost of losing the ability to explain everything else. 

 

This reminded me how back in December 2024 I emailed a professor of mine this problem, because he worked on the ontological argument for his dissertation:

 

1) To be something is to be distinguishable from other things. 

2) But to be distinguishable there must be features of that thing that make it distinguishable.

3) But those features are boundaries, and boundaries are limits.

4) So to be something is to be limited.

5) So there is nothing unlimited.

 

That professor never replied, so I'll take a stab at it myself: 

 

God is limited to great making properties, but within those great making properties God is unlimited. So there are two different kinds of limits: limits of properties and limits of degree. God is limited in properties (possessing all and only the great-making properties), but not limited in degree (possessing all and only the great-making properties to the greatest possible degree).

 

Perfection entails pseudo-limits: A perfect being is limited to all and only great-making properties. This limit is explained by perfection, which makes it a special limit. Limits explained by perfection are aspects of perfection, and thus are pseudo-limits.

 

For something to have explanatory power it needs to exist, and thus needs to have properties. But properties are not necessarily limits, and in fact an unlimited being will have all and only those great-making properties. A perfect being is distinguishable by its perfection.

 

Response 4: A Theological Problem?

 

When Christians (or redeemed persons) are raised from the dead in the new heaven and new earth, and experience the Beatific Vision, and have all their sins washed away by the righteousness of Christ imputed to them by grace through faith, and all future sins are prevented by the transformation of the body and mind through the resurrection and Beatific Vision, then Christians become, in God's eyes, truly sinless creatures for the rest of time.

 

Question: Are Christians, in this state, perfect? A similar question: Were Adam and Eve perfect before the Fall?

 

It seems obvious that perfection can only beget perfection. But Adam and Eve begot sin, so Adam and Even were not perfect. Moreover, if only God is perfect, then nothing besides God can be perfect.

 

So sinless, redeemed persons in the afterlife are not perfect creatures. And yet, doesn't Christian theology say that we will be perfect in heaven? 

 

Clearly Christian theology never says we will become as great as God. Even Christian traditions that emphasize apotheosis, the idea that we become one with God or that we become gods ourselves, would still hold God as sole perfect being, I would think.

 

So Christian theology emphasizes that those resurrected unto life are glorified, purified, sanctified, and holy. The redeemed are not perfect.

 

But that sounds a bit weird, doesn't it? If God is the perfect redeemer, and Jesus the perfect sacrifice, and the perfection of Jesus is imputed to us, then aren't we perfect too?

 

Christians slip into this language: "All will be perfect in heaven." "Everything was perfect before the Fall." What could they mean by this? It's not true that everything is perfect in heaven, because only God is perfect.

 

This doesn't seem to present any serious theological problem, but it does highlight the importance of performing analytic surgery on terms like 'perfection', 'limit', and 'boundary'. There are many different conceptions of perfection, leading to easy equivocation. For example:

 

Perfection(1): Something is perfect when it is untainted by sin. Adam and Eve were untainted by sin before the Fall, so Adam and Eve were perfect in this sense. This is true of the world more generally: the world was perfect before sin entered it. The redeemed are perfect in this sense, and so is God and even angels.

 

Perfection(2): Something is perfect when it accords precisely with my goals or preferences. The perfect house, the perfect job, the perfect partner... these change from person to person. Imperfections or flaws can thus be associated with failures to meet some subjective goal of preference.

 

Perfection(3): Something is perfect when it exists necessarily. Some folks might say that the number 2 is perfect, or mathematics is perfect, or logic is perfect. Perfection is associated with necessity. Necessary truths are perfectly true.

 

Perfection(4): Here perfection means complete or maxed out. We see this in grammar with terms like 'future perfect' or 'past imperfect'.

 

In everyday speech we often use 'perfect' to just mean that something is absolute, total, or maximized. A perfect score is the maximal possible score.

 

But notice that it's easy to mix perfections: We don't just call a 100 on a test a perfect score because it's the maximal possible score; we call it perfect because it's good. A zero is a good score in a game like golf. For an 18-hole, par 72 golf course, a score of -54, or getting 18 holes-in-one in a row, would be a perfect score. But again, the goal-oriented notion of perfection can kick in and the intuition becomes that the perfect score is not 18 holes-in-one, because that's impossible, but whatever score it takes to win the tournament.

 

Perfection(5): To be perfect is to be something that lacks all limits of power.

 

These include powers of knowledge and understanding, which includes knowledge and understanding of the goodness and badness of things. And no one with perfect understanding of the goodness and badness of things would fail to behave according to that understanding. And so, having unlimited power entails unlimited knowledge, which in turn entails unlimited goodness.

 

But perfection in this sense is impossible if some powers are impossible.