An exchange with Keith Parsons, Part I

Prof. Keith Parsons and I will be having an exchange to be moderated by Jeffery Jay Lowder of The Secular Outpost.  Prof. Parsons has initiated the exchange with a response to the first of four questions I put to him last week.  What follows is a brief reply.

Keith, thank you for your very gracious response.  Like Jeff Lowder, you raise the issue of the relative amounts of attention I and other theistic philosophers pay to “New Atheist” writers like Dawkins, Harris, et al. as opposed to the much more serious arguments of atheist philosophers like Graham Oppy, Jordan Howard Sobel, and many others.  Let me begin by reiterating what I said last week in response to Jeff, namely that I have nothing but respect for philosophers like the ones you cite and would never lump them in with Dawkins and Co.  And as I showed in my response to Jeff, I have in fact publicly praised many of these writers many times over the years for the intellectual seriousness of their work.

 
I have given the “New Atheists” the attention I have only because they have themselves gotten so much attention and needed a vigorous response.  Even so, my book The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, is, the title notwithstanding, really less about the New Atheism per se than it is about defending the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, which is my preferred approach to philosophical questions in general and the philosophy of religion in particular.  And my (non-polemical and more academic) book Aquinas has almost nothing to say about the New Atheists, beyond some brief references to Dawkins.  
 

This interest in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition is key to understanding my attitude toward authors like the ones you cite.  I would distinguish what might be called classical and modern approaches to the key themes of natural theology.  The classical approach is represented by schools of thought like Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, and Thomism and other forms of Scholasticism.  The key writers here would be thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Anselm, Avicenna, Averroes, Maimonides, Aquinas, Scotus, Suarez, and later writers influenced by them down to the present day (such as twentieth-century Neo-Scholastics and contemporary analytical Thomists). 

The modern approach is represented by Leibniz-Clarke style cosmological arguments, Paley-style design arguments and “Intelligent Design” theory, Plantinga-style ontological arguments, “Reformed epistemology,” Swinburne-style inductive arguments, etc.  Contemporary philosophy of religion is dominated by these modern sorts of arguments, though there are some thinkers (John Haldane, Brian Davies, Eleonore Stump, et al.) whose sympathies are classical.  These modern arguments typically operate with very different conceptions of causation, modality, substance, essence, and other key metaphysical notions than the ones classical thinkers would accept.

Now, my approach, being Aristotelian-Thomistic, is decidedly classical.  Like many other Thomists, I not only do not defend the sorts of arguments most other contemporary philosophers of religion do, but I am critical both of the metaphysical/epistemological assumptions underlying the arguments and of the conception of God the arguments arrive at.  For instance, I reject the possible worlds theories in terms of which modality is typically understood in the contemporary arguments; I think the “argument to the best explanation” approach gets reasoning from the world to God just fundamentally wrong; I think the rationality of theism does depend not only on there being evidence for it, but metaphysical demonstrations of an aggressively old-fashioned sort; and so forth.  I also reject the “theistic personalist” or “neo-theist” conception of God that underlies so much contemporary philosophy of religion, and regard classical theism and its key themes -- divine simplicity, immutability, eternity, etc. -- as non-negotiable elements of any theism worth defending.

Unsurprisingly, a great deal of contemporary atheist argumentation is devoted to criticizing these very ideas and arguments that I do not agree with myself.  Equally unsurprisingly, then, I have not engaged much with those atheist arguments.  I simply don’t have a dog in those fights, as it were.  I have tended instead to focus my attention on those objections that have been raised against classical arguments specifically, and especially against Aristotelian-Thomistic arguments.

Hence in my book Aquinas, for example, I have a lot to say in response to writers like Anthony Kenny and J. L. Mackie who have criticized Aquinas at some length. Naturally, I also have a lot to say there in response to Humean and Kantian objections to cosmological arguments in general.  Now, much of what contemporary atheists have to say in response to Aquinas is a reiteration of Humean objections, or of points made by writers like Kenny.  (For example, David Ramsay Steele in his book Atheism Explained, and to some extent even Mackie in The Miracle of Theism, suppose they can largely dispatch Aquinas by referring the reader to Kenny’s book on the Five Ways.)  Hence to respond to objections of the sort raised by Hume and Kenny is ipso facto to respond to much of what have become standard atheist moves vis-à-vis Aquinas. 

Other objections, as I have showed at length in Aquinas and The Last Superstition, are based on misunderstandings of the metaphysical underpinnings of Aquinas’s arguments, and often on a tendency to read modern assumptions that Aquinas would have rejected back into his arguments.  For example, it is very common for critics of Aquinas to be unaware of the distinction between what Scholastics call a per se or essentially ordered causal series and a per accidens or accidentally ordered causal series, and they fail to realize that when Aquinas rules out a regress of causes it is the first rather than the second sort he has in mind.  Critics also often wrongly assume that in the Third Way Aquinas is appealing to something like a modern understanding of modality.  And so forth.  Once these misunderstandings of the background metaphysics are cleared up, it can be seen that many standard moves against Aquinas simply miss the point.  This is true e.g. of Oppy’s treatment of Aquinas in Arguing About Gods.  I have nothing but respect for Oppy; he is smart and well-read and a formidable philosopher.  Still, in my view he just misreads Aquinas and his objections thus misfire. 

For this reason I haven’t commented explicitly on every single contemporary atheist philosopher who has criticized Aquinas.  For in the main they are offering variations on standard objections which I answer in my books and other writings, so that anyone who has read both my stuff and (say) Oppy’s book, or Sobel’s, would know how I would respond to their objections.

I don’t want to offend too much against the word limitation Jeff has proposed to us, so I will resist my tendency toward long-windedness and close with the following thought.  You may or may not know that I was an atheist myself for about ten years, and that my journey back to theism involved a discovery of what classical thinkers like Aquinas had actually said.  I recounted this intellectual journey in a blog post some time back, and as I note in that post, many of the objections I had as an atheist to the work of modern philosophers of religion are objections I still would raise as a classical theist.  So, perhaps we have at least a little more in common that it might seem at first glance!