What Counts as a Genuine Message from God?

Suppose Fred is a Christian who is facing a moral dilemma, and prays to God for advice. Now, we commonly suppose that some apparent messages from God are real, and others not. So how is someone like Fred to know which messages are really from God and which are not?

However, I think this way of thinking may presuppose a concept of God that is too anthropomorphic. Granted, if God exists He wouldn't have a bodily mouth or anything like that, and I think most reflective theists realize that. But once we set aside such a picture, if we grant that God created (and sustains) all things, what would the distinction between something's being a genuine message from God and its being a spurious one consist in?

Here it is tempting to think that, though God doesn’t speak with a bodily mouth, He still engages in some spiritual (immaterial) activity that we would perceive as a voice giving advice, or at least as a feeling that we should do such-and-such. This could be understood in different ways, of course, but if we interpret it as meaning that in order to give advice God has to do something outside of the normal course of nature, I think it is false. If all good things come from God, and the advice that Fred (thinks he) got through prayer was good moral advice, it seems it follows that the advice must have come from God in some sense. What Fred "heard" may be the result of natural processes rather that a miraculous, special revelation to him, but if one believes in Divine Providence, that need not make it any less of a message from God. For Fred's receiving that advice at that time, though by means of certain natural processes, could still on this view have been part of God's eternal plan. Arguably, all Fred really needs to know in order to tell that the message is genuine is that God exists, that God is benevolent, and that the moral advice he got was sound.

On God's Love -- A Quote from George F. Thomas

George F. Thomas says, concerning the point of Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son,

[...] The older brother represents the principle of merit and justice and quite properly complains that his younger brother’s reckless conduct has not deserved the love shown him by his father. [Citation omitted] Thus, God’s love is not measured out according to the value of the person loved, as human love is; rather, God is the Creator and His love is creative of worth. Even the sinner has some worth as a creature made in the image of God; and God’s love is “creative,” not in the sense that it gives value to a being that is wholly without value, but that it brings to fulfillment possibilities of value that were present but frustrated.

            Though God’s love is given us irrespective of our actual worth, it is effective in our lives only when we respond to it in the right way. For example, Jesus makes it clear that the forgiveness of our sins is conditional upon our willingness to forgive others. Moreover, we are commanded in the Gospels to love our neighbor and are told in the First Epistle of John that the test of our love of God is our love of our neighbor. In other words, God’s love is given to us whether we deserve it or not; but it is given with the purpose of awakening in us the desire and capacity to love Him and our neighbor. Hence, we must regard ourselves not as passive recipients of God’s love but as active and responsible beings called by God to cooperate with Him in the achievement of His purpose of love in our own lives and in the lives of others.

            Thus, God does not love us from the need of anything we can give Him in return; but He loves us with the purpose that we should return His love and thus enter into communion with Him by giving ourselves to Him. His agape-love moves downward to us, but it seeks to start in us a reciprocal movement upwards towards Him. Similarly, we are to love our neighbor without regard to his worth or his return of our love; but we are to strive through our love to awaken in him the capacity to give as well as receive love and thus to help him realize his potential worth. The result may be that our giving to him will be met by his giving to us, and a fellowship of mutual giving and receiving will be established between us.

--George F. Thomas, pp. 51-2 of Christian Ethics and Moral Philosophy, Charles Scribner’s Sons New York, 1955.

My Review of "The God Delusion"

Check out my review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion  here on Scholardarity.com .

Causation, God , and the Justification of Induction: Part 2

[Cross-posted at Philosophical Pontifications]

I think the argument of Part 1 is a good one, but it does not quite establish its conclusion: While it is highly likely, given IBE, that chance is not the true account of the regularity of the universe, metaphysically necessary causal connections are not the only alternative. Indeed, in some cases they are seemingly not even a possible alternative. For quantum mechanics tells us, on most of its interpretations, that many of the most basic regularities in nature are probabilistic. Unless we’re prepared to posit “probabilistic necessities”—i.e., that it could be necessary that something happens only in a certain percentage of cases—many of the regularities described by quantum mechanics cannot be necessary. So how could we explain them?

If we accept theism, there is a way. God, being all powerful, could surely act in such a manner that certain things happen only with a certain frequency, not all the time. But God, according to theists, is not merely some convenient metaphysical explanatory posit. He is a personal being. While perhaps not having a psychology like ours—God probably doesn’t think discursively, with one thought following after another—He is nevertheless an agent who acts for the sake of ends. Provided that those ends include creating a word that is regular—perhaps  because only such worlds are hospitable to life or sentience—it would be extremely probable, or even certain, that such a world would be actual.

Now, if we consider the matter in terms of “epistemic possibility”, there are many “possible Gods”, or “ways God could be”. A great deal of them would have no desire to create worlds that are regular. I don’t know of any good arguments to the effect that such “Gods” couldn’t have existed, so we can’t rule them out a priori. Instead, I think a theist should insist that given our actual evidence we aren’t justified in believing in them, because it is only if we posit a God who desires to create a world that exhibits regularities, albeit probabilistic ones, that we have reason to suspect such a world to be actual. If there is such a God we certainly have a better account than we would have if we thought such regularities were merely “an outrageous run of luck”. So the observed regularities in nature do cry out for explanation, but on this view their probabilistic nature favors a theistic account. Given the constancy of God’s nature and purposes, we are can confidently expect them to persist in the future. The above account, if true, would not constitute an airtight proof that the inductive schema of Part 1 is reliable, but I think it would give us a good (though defeasible) reason to accept it.

           

But all is not well. In Part 3 I’ll examine a couple objections to this account.

Causation, God , and the Justification of Induction: Part 1

[Cross-posted at Philosophical Pontifications]

Brand Blanshard (The Nature of Thought, vol. 2 , Ch. XXXII, “Concrete Necessity and Internal Relations”; Reason and Analysis, Ch. XI, “Necessity in Causation”) and A.C. Ewing (Non-Linguistic Philosophy: Ch. VI, “Causation and Induction”) gave similar arguments for the existence of “logical necessity” in causation. (Given that their views of logic are somewhat unorthodox by the standards of analytic philosophers, I think it would be more accurate and less confusing to talk of metaphysical necessity in causation, which I will do in what follows.) A “rational reconstruction” of their arguments goes something like this: If causal connections are not metaphysically necessary, the fact that similar effects follow upon similar causes, or that there are certain, seemingly exceptionless regularities in nature (which can be expressed in laws of nature) is quite remarkable. If “anything can cause anything”, as Humeans sometimes say, we have a tremendous coincidence, “an outrageous run of luck”, as Blanshard puts it (The Nature of Thought, vol. 2, Ch XXXII, “Concrete Necessity and Internal Relations”, p. 505 of the second edition), comparable to rolling a die and getting a 4 a trillion times in a row. But if causal connections are metaphysically necessary, we have a good explanation for the fact that similar effects follow upon similar causes, or that there are exceptionless regularities in nature: they obtain because they must. If events of type B necessarily follow upon events of type A, any token A event will be followed by a token B event. (Not, of course, that we can perceive this necessity: we could only perceive it if we had some kind of direct insight into the natures of type A events and type B events.) Granting that, it follows that we can justify instances of inductive inference that fit the following schema: Events of type A have always been followed by events of type B, hence, events of type A will always be followed by events of type B. 

Our argument for this schema is neither deductive nor inductive: We have not deduced, and neither have we seen through “rational insight”, that it is necessary that type A events will always be followed by type B events based on knowledge of their natures, nor have we concluded that type A events will always be followed by type B events just because they have always been so followed in the past. Our argument is rather this: In certain cases we take ourselves to have established that every observed event of type A has been followed by an observed event of type B. We also note that, since type A events are observed very frequently, it is extremely unlikely (though possible) that their association with type B events is a matter of chance. So there are two alternatives: Either the association is an astronomically improbable coincidence, or there is a necessary connection between them, albeit one that we are not able to discern.  Next we consider the principle of Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE): This principle says, very roughly, that if we have multiple hypotheses vying to account for some phenomenon, it is most reasonable to accept the hypothesis which best explains it as being true. And if we think that having any explanation is rationally preferable to having none—assuming we have no evidence which rules out all of the candidate explanations, or which renders them extremely improbable—then IBE tells us that it is always more reasonable to accept an explanatory hypothesis over a non-explanatory one. Since coincidence is no explanation, in the present case IBE counsels us to accept the hypothesis that there is a metaphysically necessary connection between type A events and type B events. Because of this necessary connection, we can conclude that in the future type A events will always be followed by type B events, just as they always have been. So we have justified our inductive schema neither deductively nor inductively, but by IBE.

Note that in the above we have not invoked the principle of sufficient reason or the idea that every event must have a cause; we are only saying that it is more reasonable to believe in a necessary connection than an astronomical coincidence. Thus the objections that can be raised against them cannot be raised against the present argument.

At this point you might be wondering about IBE. What justifies us in accepting it? Why should we believe that the hypothesis which best explains a phenomenon is the most rationally acceptable one? I think it can be justified, although it can neither be justified deductively, nor inductively, nor by IBE. It cannot be justified deductively because IBE is clearly not a truth of logic or mathematics. It also cannot be justified inductively, at least not by the kind of inductive inference being considered on the present account, because we are trying to use IBE to justify those inductive inferences, and to use them to justify IBE would be circular. Finally, to use IBE to justify itself would also be circular. Instead, I think IBE can be justified “transcendentally”. It is essentially a case of “this or nothing”. If we did not regard better explanations as more rationally acceptable, it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to justify anything that goes beyond our beliefs about elementary logic and our immediate perceptual experiences. (For one instance of this problem, see my post over at Philosophical Pontifications on Bertrand Russell’s five minute hypothesis. ) This does not refute skepticism, but it does show that anyone who rejects skepticism is entitled to use IBE; or, at the very least, that they cannot consistently criticize those who do use it.

“But how does God figure into all this?”, you might ask. If you want to know, stay tuned for Part 2!