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Antipathy to God

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Abstract

Antipathy towards the possibility that God exists is a common attitude, which has recently been clearly expressed by Thomas Nagel. This attitude is presumably irrelevant to the question whether God does exist. But it raises two other interesting philosophical issues. First, to what extent does this attitude motivate irrational belief? And secondly, how should the attitude be evaluated? This paper investigates that latter issue. Is the hope that God does not exist a morally proper hope? I simplify this question by interpreting the relevant attitude as an aversion towards the Christian picture of the world coupled with a preference for the naturalist atheistic picture. And comparing the content of those two world pictures, I argue that the attitude, though partly explicable, is morally unjustifiable, for clearly recognisable reasons. Regardless, then, of further concerns about the doxastic influence of this attitude, we ought to be ashamed of our antipathy to God, which reflects badly upon us.

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Notes

  1. I say only that I shall presume the independence of desire and truth, here, because contrary suggestions might be made. For instance, it might be maintained that our desiring that God exists is due to the fact that, being created by God, our greatest good is to be enjoyed only in relation to him—much as our desiring intimacy with another human person is due to the fact that we are constituted in such a way that it is a great good for us to enjoy such intimacy. But I shall leave such suggestions aside for the purposes of the present discussion.

  2. An anonymous reviewer has criticised my discussion for its failure to acknowledge the history of different expressions of antipathy to God, the very diverse historical contexts in which those expressions have occurred, the behaviour of those who have harboured an anti-religious attitude, including violence towards the members of one or other religion, and other matters. As I say at the beginning of this article, the kind of attitude expressed by Nagel has many diverse historical antecedents. But my article is not a discussion in the history of ideas; and nor, within an essay of this size, would an adequate historical survey be possible. Rather, I am concerned to provide an evaluative examination of a particular attitude per se. So, with Nagel, I am not here concerned with antipathy to religious believers. Nor am I focussing on antipathy to particular religious institutions, nor on antipathy to the behaviour and practices of religious believers (including, as Nagel puts it, their ‘moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence’). Rather, with Nagel, I am focussing on antipathy to a possible way the world could be—namely, the way it would be if the proposition ‘God exists’ were true. But in order to get any analytic grip upon this attitude, we need to know what those who harbour the attitude mean by ‘God’, and also what kind or range of possible states of affairs they suppose would obtain if ‘God exists’ were false. We need, in other words, to know what kind of state of affairs they hope not to exist, and what kind of state of affairs they suppose would exist instead.

  3. Bruce Langtry has pointed out to me that this kind of case seems to indicate that I hope that p is not closed under known entailment. For in the case as described, it can be true that I hope that my neighbour dies painlessly and of course true that I know that his dying painlessly entails his dying, without it being true that I hope that he dies.

    In their paper ‘Should we want God not to exist?’ (unpublished), which responds to my earlier discussions of this topic, Morgan Luck and Nathan Ellerby use a similar kind of case as a basis upon which to suggest that, in general, one can properly hope for a state of affairs which one believes would be worse than its alternative, provided both that one is not completely certain that it would be worse and that one hopes that it would not be worse. But their suggestion seems to me to go too far. For it would allow as morally permissible the following kind of hope. Suppose that I hope to see a particular colleague struck by a thunderbolt. I hope that this will happen to him simply because I believe it would be fun for me to watch (and not because I believe that he deserves it, or because it would do him or others any good). I believe (according to the position taken by Luck and Ellerby) that my colleague would be destroyed by the thunderbolt. However, I have read a little popular physics, which tells me that the laws of nature are merely probabilistic, and a little speculative discussion of personal identity, and as a consequence I am not completely certain that immediately after the impact his body would not spontaneously rearrange itself in such a way that he would continue to exist unharmed. And because I am not thoroughly malicious, I entertain the hope that he would thereby survive the thunderbolt strike, even though I really do believe that he wouldn’t… I do not think that I have here described a set of circumstances in which it would be permissible for me to hope that my colleague is struck by a thunderbolt.

  4. Philosophers are also making valuable contributions to this discussion. See for instance Bergmann, Murray and Rea, eds. (2010), and Copan (2011).

  5. Christian theologians have differed over the ways and degrees to which human choices are subject to God’s control. But I shall presume that the kind of human autonomy I have here described—which embraces the conditions of a broad moral responsibility and of accountability to God—is a common feature of the various specific theological pictures.

  6. Here, again, there is a variety of theological views concerning the manner and extent of our chosen participation.

  7. The following anecdote may be instructive. I had occasion to be discussing this general topic with a philosophical colleague, and in order to focus upon the issue, I put to him the question ‘If these were the live options, which kind of possible world do you think that you ought to hope is the actual world—the Judaeo-Christian world, or the atheistic naturalist world?’ He reflected upon this carefully for some minutes, and then replied frankly, in the ungrammatical vernacular, ‘Of course, I don’t want there to exist anyone who is better than me’. He might well have been speaking for many of us.

  8. Guy Kahane has appealed to further considerations in some defence of the anti-God desire, in Kahane, G. (2011). In a future article ‘On Wanting God Not to Exist’, I argue that Kahane’s defence fails.

References

  • Bergmann, M., Murray, M. J., & Rea, M. C. (Eds.). (2010). Divine evil? The moral character of the God of Abraham. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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  • Copan, P. (2011). Is God a moral monster? Making sense of the Old Testament God. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books.

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  • Kahane, G. (2011). Should we want God to exist? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 82(3), 674–696.

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  • Nagel, T. (1997). The last word. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Acknowledgements

For valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper, I am very grateful to my philosophy colleagues at Charles Sturt University, to Peter Forrest, to the anonymous reviewers for this journal and especially to Bruce Langtry.

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Correspondence to G. R. McLean.

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McLean, G.R. Antipathy to God. SOPHIA 54, 13–24 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-014-0414-4

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