Theism Debate Review

Today was my debate with Professor Garcia at LBCC. It went really well. I went in a bit worried, which is not normal for me when I do debates. Why was I worried? I was worried because Garcia had requested that I specifically do a medieval argument, and then he later requested I do only Aquinas. I've not defended Aquinas or scholastic metaphysics in any depth as I have done with arguments like the Kalam or Liebnizian Cosmological arguments, so, not only did I have to defend it, but I had to defend it from someone who has at least a Masters in Philosophy (I'm unsure if he has a PhD). It would be a challenge, but I suppose philosophy isn't worth doing if it's not challenging. 

I had tried to email him so we could collaborate on some slides, but it just didn't happen for a number of reasons. There was some comfort that I took in thinking that I would be able to see his presentation so I could prepare some remarks, but that didn't happen and I had to think on my feet. Which was fine. The turn out was decent. Last club meeting maybe two extra people were there, and today there was about a dozen or so students in attendance.

Before the debate started, I went to the school library an checked out two books, The Miracle of Theism by J.L. Mackie and God, Freedom, and Evil by Alvin Plantinga, just to show the students that if they were interested in the topic, our school had some pretty decent resources. Like I've said, the purpose of the debate was not to "win" but to inform. But winning was nice. 

So here is my statement. After I printed it, I read it out loud to time myself and I made some minor corrections and crossed out some redundancies on the hard copy, corrections I'm too lazy to go back and correct on the blog :-P 

After I gave my speech, Garcia went up and gave his presentation, which was very entertaining. I had anticipated that he would do something about the problem of evil since he had mentioned to me that he was going through that with his students, so I skimmed Plantinga's book just to refresh my memory. Didn't need to, turned out.

It was surprising to see that Garcia basically gave Daniel Dennett's view on naturalism as an explanation of religious phenomenon. Here is a video of Dennett's view, which more or less starts at 13:40. I like Dennett. He's very readable, but just doesn't have a clue when it comes to the philosophy of religion. Very much like how Bertrand Russell was was well informed in logic but had no clue what he was talking about when it came to the philosophy of religion. 

I went up to give a rebuttal and I was very comfortable. I had three points to make. First, I could agree with everything that was said and it would say nothing about the truth of the premises. For example, under the same naturalist explanation, you could explain how I came to believe  the Pythagorean Theorem, and its spread could be explained by it's utility. Yet none of this speaks to its truth. Second, and I acknowledged that this wasn't really to the point, but I was curious to hear how Dennett and Garcia would respond to the empirical fact that many religions have a history of martyrs. How could a view that allows for self destruction be encouraged in a Darwinian view? Things that self destruct don't tend to reproduce (or duplicate beliefs) so how does religion spread? Garcia responded by saying that things can be self destructive but so long as they duplicate themselves beforehand, it has succeeded. This seemed consistent with some of the examples of parasites he gave. My third point was that this naturalism as explanation doesn't produce truth, only beliefs that are suited towards survival. I used an image that Garcia used in his presentation, that of a woman on guard in alley with a man behind her. I said that what benefits her survival, is the belief that this man is out to get her and so she becomes aware and on the defense, even though it may really be the case that this man poses no threat to her, but her false belief that he did benefited her. Likewise, we can hold to any number of beliefs because they help our reproduction and survival, but there is no necessary connection to truth, and as philosophers, we should be dedicated to truth. We could further apply the explanation to the naturalist view itself and say that this Darwinian explanation needn't be true, just good for survival, so why believe it? This is Plantinga's general approach to Dennett's view. The interaction between the two is where I drew my criticisms from, and here is a review of the debate between the two, if the audio is too long. 

Garcia agreed with the first point. He went on to rebut my opening speech. He didn't take any issue with the metaphysics. He asked, "Why believe that pure act is God?" This was one of last paragraphs, and I was surprised this was lost on him. So I briefly recapped two crucial aspects, that at every moment pure act sustains us, and if we understand God to be anything, he is the ultimate cause of things, and that pure act is immutable, or unchanging, which we traditionally understand God to be, so that these qualities are entailed by the nature of Pure Act, which is why we call Pure Act God. I made a sloppy point about names. I said that we aren't trying to identify our preconceived notion of God as Pure Act, but that whatever you might think God is, Pure Act is that. It is more important that you identify first that there is Pure Act rather than believe in God and see what evidence and arguments may be given for such a being. 

A student asked me if Pure Act was omniscient or sentient. I purposefully avoided adding omniscience as a quality because mind and intellect as they relate to God and how we understand these terms are very different from modern discussions of mind. Here is a good primer if you were so inclined. So, I tried to be careful and qualify at the beginning of my response that we cannot properly predicate anything to God. God has no predicates, and God is not a member of any genus. God doesn't have anything, or is not a being among other beings, rather he is being itself. So, when I say that God does have omniscience, I say so only in analogous terms. And since ignorance is a potential to know something, God, being Pure Act, knows everything. He doesn't potentially know anything. 

Garcia pounced on this. If God is ineffable, as I stated, then how can we even talk about God? I responded say we can talk of God analogously. He replied that analogies only work when you compare two things, which entails knowledge of those two things, one of which is God in this sense. I challenged that and said when we infer that there is Pure Act by observing change in our world, we know what it is that we are observing, but we further infer from that what Pure Act might be like from that. So, in that case, knowledge of one helps us discover what the other is like. Here is a brief explanation of Aquinas' use of analogy. Here is my good friends interaction with another philosopher on analogy, and how it related to simplicity. 

Another question Garcia asked was that it seemed to be that even if there was such a being, it would be uninteresting and have no real effect in our lives. Not so, I responded. A being that sustains your existence at every moment does have a vested interest in you. And since goodness is being, and badness is a privation, Pure Act is goodness, so there is a benevolent being that has an interest in sustaining your existence, which should at least make one curious about why this is the case. 

The last exchange, following up on my last reply, he asked whether or not God having a desire implies a lack in God, which means he does have a potentiality and so is not pure actuality. I had to say I was a bit sloppy in wording, but reiterated that we mean these things in just an analogical way. If I could go back, I would add by directly challenging that proposition, and argue why desires don't entail any lack, and maybe talk about the relevance of Cambridge properties. 

And with that, it was over. This event was put on as a recruiting event for the philosophy club, and we had some people express interest in regularly attending, so, I was happy about that. :-)