In this talk, Alex Pruss discusses an argument for God's existence.
Whatever force the argument may have had though seems to instantly evaporate when at the very end he is asked about the problem of evil.
He responds by saying the greatest things in life are virtues, especially moral virtues like forgiveness, generosity, perseverance, and so on. But these virtues require suffering.
There are many ways one can respond to this, but here is a unique way. There's a very special virtue that Christians cannot possibly access, which is the virtue of persevering through loss of faith.
Let's imagine two people, Alice and Bob.
Alice is raised Christian and she never changes her worldview. She lives a normal, basic life of marriage, children, and so on.
Bob is raised Christian, and comes to a deep certainty in God and Jesus, and loves God and Jesus with all his heart, mind, and soul. But slowly, doubts creep in. At first, he pushes them away, because his love for God is so great that he cannot bear the thought that God might not exist. But over the years, he develops an obsession to prove that God exists to shut up those evil atheists who clearly just want to sin guilt-free. But in Bob's pursuit of truth, he discovers philosophy and philosophical methodology. He ends up pursuing a degree or two in philosophy. Very slowly, over many years, and in large part due to personal experiences of evil, tragedy, and unanswered prayers, the intellectual challenges to belief in God and Christianity eventually weigh heavily enough on Bob that he just can't believe anymore, despite how badly he wants God to be real and for Christianity to be true.
Bob wrestles with truth, with his own self-identity, his view of humanity and the world, the meaning of life, the nature of morality, everything. By losing his faith, life in many ways has suddenly become much harder. Before, he could trust in God, and let God guide him through life. Now, there is no God to protect Bob or validate Bob's existence through divine love. There is no God-given purpose to Bob's life.
Bob is in a terrifying place.
And yet, bravely, through seemingly miraculous strength, he picks himself up and builds a worldview that can account for morality, the meaning of life, the origins of religion, and so on. He humbly accepts his newfound worthlessness. (Bob smartly believes in a mitigated cynicism, so he doesn't view himself as entirely worthless. But he no longer sees himself as the immortal soul he once did.)
Bob bravely accepts that death is the end. There is a kind of ego death in accepting the fact that you are a limited, mortal being with no eternal God to love you or keep you alive. Instead of cowering behind comforting beliefs, Bob follows the truth where it leads, even when it leads to conclusions Bob so badly wants to be able to reject. Bob allows the truth, not desire, to guide his beliefs, and as excruciating as it was to give up his dreams of being with God forever and face the infinite disappointment of life, he perseveres through, through sheer strength, determination, and rationality.
Question: Is Bob a virtuous person? More virtuous than Alice? Not only is it true that he is, but he seems to capture some very special and powerful virtues, virtues inaccessible to a person of faith.
So Christianity has a problem. It probably relies on some kind of story like the one Pruss gives. The sheer good of perseverance through suffering gives the suffering a purpose and beauty to it. (Of course, as I've written on, I'm skeptical of virtues as being able to justify evils. I think I gave the example of a 9/11 first responder being asked whether he would rather have 9/11 and all the bravery of the first responders and the perseverance of the survivors, or to lose all of that virtue and prevent 9/11 from happening. The answer is so obvious that he's insulted.)
But what better story of perseverance than one like Bob's? Persevering through loss of faith seems to me to be just about the greatest kind of persevering there is (I say with a hefty amount of bias), given how existentially deep it is and how it demands you to be radically open-minded and to be so radically open to not only changing yourself to match up with reality, but to change yourself completely and absolutely. To go from someone who wants God more than anything to a person who is at peace with the godlessness of the world, and at peace with his own mortality, and to go from viewing oneself as a divine, everlasting creature to a creature of limited value, is frankly an achievement so great that it's hard to comprehend.
In fact, there's a kind of dual virtue taking place. Bob has the sensitivity, love, blamelessness, empathy, and compassion needed to love God and to desire ultimate justice for all people, and needed to recognize just how much we lose when we lose God. At the same time, Bob has the love of truth, open-mindedness, humility, discipline, bravery, and patience to follow the truth where it leads.
By promoting the value of virtue to save Christianity from the problem of evil, the Christian ironically promotes the value of the virtues involved in persevering through loss of faith. And if existential perseverance is one of the greatest virtues there are, then it's not clear that the Christian has any advantage over the non-Christian when it comes to capturing the goodness of virtue. If anything, the ex-Christian who demonstrates dual virtue has the advantage.
If I'm not mistaken, Richard Swinburne once evinced a kind of regret over not changing his worldview, because doing so is such a strong demonstration of intellectual virtue (assuming you're changing your worldview for the right reasons).
Edit: Found it: YouTube: Oxford Academic (Oxford University Press), "Has your worldview changed since you started doing philosophy? | Richard Swinburne" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxlYAssgD58
"I often feel guilty about this because I greatly admire people who had a certain worldview and then come to have certain important life experiences or been exposed to certain arguments and suddenly abandoned it and given up that view and adopted a different one, and I think these are highly rational people . . ."
No comments:
Post a Comment