Keith Ward - The God Conclusion

First published in 2009 by

Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd

1 Spencer Court

140 142 Wandsworth High Street

London SW18 4JJ

2009 Keith Ward

The right of Keith Ward to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Digital Edition converted and published by Andrews UK Ltd 2010

Introduction

This book defends one main thesis. It is that the Western classical tradition in philosophy found in the works of the great philosophers who would normally be studied in Colleges accepts the God conclusion. There is a supreme spiritual (non-physical) reality which is the cause or underlying nature of the physical cosmos, and which is of great, and maybe the greatest possible, value or perfection.

The book is a defence of this thesis, because the thesis has in recent years been denied, dismissed, or simply overlooked by many writers. It is important to remember our intellectual history, and to remember that belief in God has usually been expounded by the best-known philosophers as the most rational view of the world. Such belief has hardly ever been regarded as a matter of blind faith or of some irrational leap in the dark. It lies at the very basis of acceptance of the intelligibility of the universe, of the importance of morality, and of a deep understanding of the nature of human existence.

In defending this thesis, I have also taken the opportunity to defend many lost causes, to try to correct some widely held but mistaken ideas about what philosophers have believed, and to defend a few currently unfashionable ideas. So I hope my defence will be entertainingly provocative as well as being correct.

Thus I defend Plato against Sir Karl Poppers attack on him as an enemy of the open society. I defend Aquinas Five Ways of demonstrating the existence of God. I show that Descartes was not what is usually described as a Cartesian dualist. I defend (to a great extent) Bishop Berkeleys immaterialism. I attack with some vigour David Humes arguments against God. I show that Kant did not destroy all possible arguments for God. I try to show that Hegel is not unintelligible, that Schopenhauer was not really an atheist, and that Nietzsche got into an irretrievable mess about freedom. I conclude by arguing that modern materialism is probably already out of date, and that at the very least it is an incomplete theory on a number of counts. If accepted it would of course rule out the existence of God. But I argue that it is not a strong enough theory to bring the main Western theistic tradition to an end.

The book is not really about the philosophy of religion. It is about philosophy insofar as its major concerns impinge upon religion. The connections are quite close, since some major philosophical questions are concerned with the ultimate nature of reality, the nature of the human person, questions of meaning, value and purpose, and questions of responsibility, freedom and morality.

Philosophers have something of a reputation for independence of mind and scepticism, and they usually dislike being thought of as defenders of any sort of orthodoxy. There are some notable defenders of orthodox belief, like Thomas Aquinas. But even he was banned from teaching for a while by the Bishop of Paris, and his views were thought to be very advanced in the thirteenth century.

Nevertheless it is the case that most major philosophers have inclined to a roughly Idealist view of the world they have thought that there is something mind-like at the basis of things, or that values are in some sense objective. There has always been an anti-Idealist opposition, and it still exists today. Some of the best-known philosophers of recent times have inclined to reductionist or materialist views of one sort or another, though they are in fact a minority among professional philosophers.

I intend to treat matters historically, moving from the ancient Greeks, by way of late medieval Christendom and the Enlightenment, to recent emphasis on problems of consciousness and artificial intelligence. It may seem an unduly European or Western history. But it is in Europe that philosophy, understood as the pursuit of critical and independent thinking, has flourished. It may only be part of a rich and much more varied global heritage of thought. But the problems it has dealt with, and the way in which it has dealt with them, remain characteristic of a specific tradition of thought that was born in Greece and flourished conspicuously in Europe after the Enlightenment. So it may be seen as one important tradition of human thought.

Some might hold that the tradition has now come to an end. But I think that, on the contrary, it still has a great deal of importance to contribute to human understanding of the world. I think it is vital to consider the questions about God it raises in a serious, critical and informed way, and not to let discussions about God degenerate, as these days they often do, into a conflict of unsubstantiated prejudices. I also think that philosophy, while it is serious, should also be fun. I hope it is.

Chapter 1

Why Plato Was Not a World-hating Totalitarian

All agree that philosophy really begins, as far as a substantial set of writings is concerned, with Plato. He clearly formulated the two fundamental questions of philosophy: What do you mean? and How do you know? In his Dialogues he gets his hero, usually Socrates, to demonstrate to others that they do not really know exactly what they mean by most of the terms they use. And Socrates victims are usually unable to explain how they know the things they claim to know. Perhaps the historical Socrates, who was condemned by the Athenian democracy for impiety and for corrupting the youth, had just annoyed too many people too much. And so philosophers continue to annoy today.

Plato, of course, was not Socrates. Plato was an aristocrat who wrote books, while Socrates was not. Plato, especially later in his life, developed some quite positive and dogmatic views, which probably did not originate with Socrates. And Plato made a rather feeble and unsuccessful attempt to construct a political system in Crete, and to draw up plans for a perfect state which are of quite Draconian strictness.

Partly for that reason, Plato has been demonised by some as a reactionary and repressive autocrat. Karl Poppers book, The Open Society and Its Enemies,1 depicts Plato as one of the great enemies of liberal democracy. And it is true that Plato presented democracy as the second worst of all political systems in his dialogue The Republic.2 He depicts the perfect society as an aristocracy, but it is more like what we might call a meritocracy, government by the wise, by an aristocracy of the mind.

But Plato suggests that, even if such a society ever actually could exist, it would inevitably decline by successively worse stages. First would come timocracy, where the love of honour and military might, of pride and ambition, would predominate. Plato is here thinking of Athens great enemy, Sparta, which had just won a war against Athens, and was a strongly disciplined militaristic society, ruling over a class of virtual slaves.

This would in turn decline into plutocracy, the rule of the rich. After that would come democracy, which Plato characterises as the rule of the mob. And finally would come the worst of all states, despotism, the rule of a dictator, when reason and justice have been almost wholly eradicated, and the will of the tyrant is the only law.

This is a rather gloomy prognosis, and it is interesting to see how Karl Marx used a very similar progression for his analysis of human history, though he gave it what was meant to be a much more positive interpretation. For Marx, aristocratic reason had never ruled. But the feudal system was, for him, a form of timocracy; capitalism succeeded it, and was in effect the rule of the rich. Democracy was the rule of the bourgeoisie, and was to be succeeded by the dictatorship of the proletariat. Whereas for Plato this succession was a decline, for Marx it was a historically inevitable and progressive liberation from ancient tyranny. It would all end, as Platos had begun, with a perfect society. But for Marx the Communist society would be one in which all are equal and all take just what they need, and give to society what they are able.