Owen Anderson's book, The Clarity of God's Existence, is meant to be a precursor to Gangadean's work. The former doesn't aim to prove that God exists, it merely purports to show us why we need clarity in some sense or why it must/should be clear. Gangadean and I disagree vehemently on this very issue and I've yet to hear a cogent, non-question begging response from that camp.
Anderson explicitly states that for humans to be held responsible for unbelief in God, it must be clear that God exists. That is to say, inexcusability implies clarity i.e., the clarity of God's existence is a necessary condition for unbelief to be inexcusable. However, curiously he says nothing explicitly about whether he thinks clarity is also a sufficient condition for inexcusability. Gangadean certainly thinks that clarity is both necessary and sufficient for the inexcusability of unbelief. I'm not trying to be pedantic. What's at issue is this: if clarity is necessary but not sufficient for holding nonbelievers guilty, then that would mean that there are other conditions, in addition to clarity, needing to be satisfied for persons to be culpable for unbelief. In other words, even assuming it was clear that God exists, unbelief in God could still be excusable. So while Anderson explicitly states a more modest thesis (i.e., he's just trying to establish the necessity condition), Gangadean ultimately needs to show that the following biconditional to be true: unbelief in God is inexcusable if and only if, it is clear. In fact, Anderson waffles a lot between the two throughout his book. I think he loses sight of the fact that he's set out initially to show the necessity condition, and so for much of the book goes into trying to establish the sufficiency claim (see pg. 2 of his book for an explicit statement of his thesis). Indeed, he criticizes alternative views for failing to provide sufficient conditions and to my mind it doesn't make any sense to offer an alternative that fails to do the same! I'm flagging this now because my criticisms centrally attack the sufficiency claim (i.e., that clarity is sufficient for inexcusability)--but I assure you they aren't misplaced.
As Anderson sees it, according to "historic Christianity (i.e., what he deems as the right sect of Christianity)" unbelief in God leads to maximal consequences. That is to say, all humans are held responsible or guilty for failing to believe in God. And he wants to make sense of what this entails about how knowable God's existence is. To this, Anderson claims that God's existence must be clear to reason i.e., knowable to all persons at all times, in some sense. But what does it mean for God's existence or anything for that matter to be clear or knowable? He contends that insofar as the proposition, "God exists" is clear in the pertinent sense, it must be demonstrated, that the opposite is not possible (165). Now I take it that for Anderson, a proposition can be clear in the relevant sense without actually having been demonstrated. So it's probably more precise to say that clarity implies demonstrability. We can imagine worlds pretty different from ours, where Gangadean and his people are very different so that no "proof" of God's existence is ever put forward or considered (I'm assuming for the sake of discussion that such a proof "exists" whatever that means). In such worlds, provided they are still inhabited by rational persons (or potential believers), I take it that Anderson will want to say that God's existence is still clear to reason. This would be so even if nobody in such a world actually believed that God exists on the basis of such a proof. This is the only way I can make sense of the principle of clarity as it concerns God's existence applying to all persons and at all times. The clarity is in some sense objective and the associated norm applies to every person--so that for all humans, unbelief is always to be inexcusable. Thus one can be held responsible for failing to believe despite never having heard or considered such a proof and indeed even if no one in the world has ever considered or heard such a proof. What matters is that God's existence is merely such that it can be known or can be proved in some suitable sense.
So when we say that a person has no excuse for unbelief, this is meant to cover even the nonbeliever that has never encountered such a proof of God's existence. Gangadean's favorite imagined example of this is the child in Ubangi. He could have known that God exists because he could have reasoned to a demonstration (even if he actually doesn't). But what exactly does it mean that he could have reasoned to such a proof? We're getting into modals again. Well, on standard ways of thinking about the matter, to assert, 'The child can/could know', one expresses something with the following truth conditions: had the world been different in certain ways, that very child would have reasoned to a proof (though as the world actually is, he doesn't). Or in possible-worlds-speak, there's at least one possible world where that child knows that God exists. That's at least the standard picture of the truth conditions of counterfactuals.
[Technical note, (meaning ignore this unless you're strangely curious about possible-worlds-semantics): in this case, it's may initially seem a bit tricky because the very scenario of the child in Ubangi is hypothetical rather than actual. Hence we're dealing with a counterfactual relative to another counterfactual i.e., we're asking what is possibly-possible. But rest assured, the semantics for counterfactuals are designed to deal with such things. To model it, we begin with the actual world, and then imagine altering it so that it includes our ignorant child in Ubangi; this gives us a possible world, call it w1. Next, we further change w1 some more (so that the child in Ubangi does actually come up with a proof of God's existence, to make the possibly-possible world, which we'll call w2. All of this gives us the truth conditions for the statement 'the possibly existent child in Ubangi could show that God exists'. If there is at least one such coherently constructed world like w2, then the statement is true and if not it's false].
My point is that when we assess what it means that God's existence is clear to reason or knowable, we don't mean anything like 'everybody believes that God exists.' Nor do we mean that everybody actually uses reason (to the fullest) and thus knows that God exists. We mean something like, if everyone were to use reason to the fullest (which is counterfactual), then everyone would believe that God exists on the basis of proof. This is a counterfactual conditional and its truth conditions can be represented using possible-worlds. To say something like, "if all people were to use reason to the fullest, then all would know that God exists" is to assert something with the following truth conditions: "in all the worlds within a particular domain, where people use reason to the fullest, everyone knows that God exists". Notice that what we're in effect doing is considering worlds where the antecedent of our original statement is true. But that doesn't restrict our domain very much because there are an infinite number of such worlds. As I noted in my primer on modals, a single change to any one of the countless facts that describe the actual world yields a unique possible world. Some of these will be very different from the actual world ("further away") and some of these will be relatively more similar (or "closer"). So how do we determine our domain (which worlds to keep in and which ones to ignore) when we assess the truth of the counterfactual? That's a question to keep in mind.
In his book the issue comes up about free will and compatibilism and this is where a lot of trouble enters in for Anderson. Though he doesn't speak about his commitment to the doctrine of total depravity in so many words, he does speak about his compatibilist notion of freedom, moral responsibility and the fall of man. In a few lines he says that even if people are born into sin so that it's impossible (in some sense) for them to seek to know what is clear, this doesn't threaten the connection between clarity and inexcusability because there's another sense in which it is possible for them to seek (more on that below). What he's admitting is that according to his worldview, a person will only know what is clear if they seek to know what is clear. But the reason humans don't seek to know what is clear is not ultimately due to their own choices, it's due to the fact that God has created them a certain way (else, they would be self-caused beings). It would appear then that there some tension between inexcusability and what the nonbeliver could do given determinism.
So why isn't this an excuse for unbelief? Anderson has two responses (note we're getting into the sufficiency claim as I flagged earlier).
First, he asserts that compatibilism about determinism and culpability is true. He notes that what causes a fallen person to not seek is not something "outside" of them, but something intrinsic to them or what he calls their "true character" (42). I'm not sure what he hopes to have achieved here. Does he think he's shown that it is clear to reason that compatibilism is true? I think there is a lot of room to press him for more on this point alone, but I'll save that for another post. More significantly, why should we think that the very fact that unbelief is the result of a persons "true character" entails that a person can be (justly) held responsible for unbelief? He doesn't justify that crucial point.
My own reaction to Anderson's approach here is to say that I can't imagine a better or stronger excuse that the non-believer might give than this: "it was impossible for me to believe in God, because God created me in such a way where I didn't have the true character to seek to know. And without seeking to know what is clear, it's metaphysically impossible for me to know what is clear." But that's basically what Anderson thinks would not be an excuse and so consonant with his theory that unbelief is inexcusable due to clarity. I think this just makes epistemic clarity utterly irrelevant to the culpability of unbelief.
Now the idea that basic things are clear was introduced so as to make sense of the way that unbelievers of all stripes and times could be (justly) held morally responsible for their lack of belief in God (and other basic things). Anderson's "answer" is that there is some sense in which such persons could have known. Tacit in all of this is also the ought-implies-can principle: a person ought to believe that God exists only if they can do so. In possible-worlds talk, what it means that an unbeliever can believe or know (even if they don't actually believe) is to say that there is at least one possible world where they do believe or know. But as I've already pointed out, there's always this question about which possibilities we should consider when evaluating a statement about what could be or is possibly the case. In other words, how restrictive or laxed should our domain be? The truth value of 'S could have known basic things even if he doesn't' will change depending on which possibilities we consider and which ones we don't or in other words, which possible worlds we "look at" when we consider the claim. The point I'm driving is the semantics of 'could' or 'can' or 'possibly' is not univocal. There are different kinds of possibility. And the problem is that we haven't got a principled a priori means of choosing which possible worlds (which sense of 'can' or 'could' or 'possibility) to include and which ones to ignore.
So take Bob, who is an atheist in our world and doesn't believe that God exists. The statement we want to evaluate for truth is the following. 'Bob can know that God exists.' To determine its truth we might consider every single possible world, at least in theory. Such a list will include countless worlds or variations of our reality. At first glance it seems reasonable to think that at least one of these worlds are different enough from our world so that Bob (or his counterpart) is not an atheist in such a world. This is one way to understand what is being expressed with 'Bob can know that God exists' namely, that there is at least one possible world among the set of all possible worlds, where Bob knows that God exists. But that won't help us with Anderson's claims about clarity. After all, if we consider every last possible world, we're going to get worlds that are radically different than ours. We're going to get worlds with much more empirical evidence of God's existence, or perhaps when miracles like God writing on the wall is much more common, and where Gangadeanian philosophy reigns the day, or whatever. But so what if in one of these radically different worlds, Bob (or his counterpart) believes that God exists? It just wouldn't matter to the claim about clarity (in our world), that Bob believes or knows basic things in those radically different (or "distant") worlds. So right off the bat we're going to need to restrict our domain to consider only those worlds with the exact same amount of evidence, arguments, and the like as our world rather than all possible worlds. Indeed the only changes to our reality we should consider are those concerning Bob, so we need to restrict our domain even further. Remember the responsibility for unbelief is supposed to reside on the unbeliever's shoulders, so it wouldn't matter a lick for our purposes, if Bob believes or knows basic things in worlds that are very different from ours in terms of facts external to Bob.
Furthermore, as we noted earlier, for Gangadean and Anderson, a necessary condition for S knowing what is clear, is that S seeks to know what is clear. But then whether or not a person seeks to know or not, is ultimately beyond their control. Sure it's part of their "true character" but their true-character is designed by God. So if we imagine all the possible worlds where God has designed Bob's true character to not seek (to be fallen and unregenerate as in the actual world), then not one of these worlds is going to be a world where Bob knows what's clear. That's just what it means that seeking to know is (metaphysically?) necessary for knowing what is clear. There is no possible world where a person knows what is clear without seeking.
Things get worse when you consider whether God's designing of persons like Bob is itself contingent or necessary. Is there any contingency in God or his will? If God designs Bob with the "true character" of not seeking, and God does so out of a necessarily immutable will, then there is no other way Bob could have been. That means in whatever possible world we can imagine wherein Bob exists he's going to exist with the exact same "true-character" that he's got in the actual world. Since according to Anderson, seeking is necessary for knowing basic things, in every single possible world that Bob exists, he doesn't know that God exists. On the current analysis, our statement of interest, 'Bob can know what is clear', is simply false in which case Bob has a very good excuse for unbelief---namely, that he can't know.
So when we consider a statement like, "Bob can know what is clear" we consider possible worlds, we've got to make some decisions about which set of possible worlds we should care about in determining the truth-value of our original statement (i.e., what sense of 'can' is of interest). We can consider all of those possible worlds which are identical to ours with respect to Bob's desires in the actual world. That's one way of restricting our domain in evaluating the truth of the statement. In all of those worlds, Bob doesn't know what's clear because according to Gangadean, seeking is necessary to know what is clear. So then the statement, 'Bob can know what is clear' is false relative to this semantics of 'can'.
Anderson is aware that there are different senses of 'can' and he must be aware of the fact that on certain readings of 'can' the nonbeliever simply can't know that God exists which threatens the sufficiency of clarity for inexcusability. Hence on pg. 39. Anderson introduces what he calls different "levels" of freedom e.g., the practical level, the political level, psychological level, worldview level, presuppositional level, and rational level. But his discussion to me is not that helpful because he doesn't really tell us what it means for a person to be psychologically able or free to perform some action while unable to in a practical sense. We can model these more precisely though in terms of possible-worlds. Each "level" corresponds to a different set of worlds so that for instance when we ask whether Bob is psychologically able to perform some action A, we are asking only about worlds where Bob's psychology (and everything else that it entails) is the same as it is in the actual world, while varying other relevant details. If at least one of these worlds is a world where Bob performs A, then it's true that Bob is psychologically-able to perform A (in the actual world) even if he doesn't. Importantly, Anderson would like to say that these "levels" are to be arranged in some hierarchy so that certain freedoms (like what one is psychologically free to do) amounts to a less significant freedom than the "presuppositional level." Unfortunately, he merely asserts this and gives us nothing resembling justification for the claim. At this point we should treat it as nothing but mere speculation. And the same can be said about a number of other claims, not the least of which is that humans have voluntary control over whether or not they use reason (I have no idea how he knows a thing like that because again he doesn't give us any justification for the claim), but I digress. Ultimately, what Anderson is trying to accomplish is that there is a substantial sense in which the unregenerate nonbeliever like Bob can (or is free to) know what is clear despite the fact that God has created him in such a way that it's impossible for him to (in another sense). Anderson thus exploits the ambiguity of 'can' though he refers to it as 'freedom'.
So according to Anderson, Bob, can know what is clear in the following sense: If Bob seeks, then he can know what is clear.' To evaluate the truth of such a claim we restrict the worlds we're interested in to include only and all those worlds where the antecedent is true. That is, we narrow our conceptual search of imagined variants of our world to not all possible worlds, but just those worlds where Bob seeks. Again we're going to ignore worlds with radically different evidence, or evidential standards than ours, and worlds that involve changes extrinsic to Bob otherwise it won't make much sense for our purposes. Now if in at least one of those worlds, Bob does know what is clear to reason, then the statement, 'If Bob seeks, then he knows what is clear' is true. This is what Anderson thinks is the relevant understanding of 'can' in the original statement, 'Bob can know what is clear'.
[In fact, he and Gangdean would go further because they think that seeking is also sufficient for knowing what is clear, so it turns out that every one of the worlds where the antecedent is true, are worlds where Bob knows what's clear. So the counterfactual should really be stated as, "If Bob seeks, then he must know'.]
So we've just seen two ways of understanding the modal 'can' in 'Bob can know what is clear' which actually yields two different truth values. Since 'Bob' is just a stand in for any arbitrary nonbeliever, the point generalizes to claims like, 'any and all nonbelievers can know that God exists'. When we consider only those possible worlds where Bob is created by God in the same exact way as he is in the actual world, the statement is false because in all of those worlds, Bob fails to know. On the other hand, if we think of the statement in the way that Anderson would like us to, so that there's a hidden antecedent condition, then our original statement turns out true. There are of course far more than the two senses of 'can' or 'able' that we've just considered, but this suffices to make my point that the notion is ambiguous in significant ways. So let me state two problems with Anderson's approach which I think is essentially to suggest an entirely unmotivated reading of 'Bob can know what is clear, even if he doesn't'.
1) If we think that God creates the world out of the necessity of his being and that his being (including his will) couldn't have been different, we think that such worlds are not even possible worlds. They are logically impossible because they would require God to design different people than he actually has created, which depends on God being different in some way. So on this line, the worlds that Anderson wants us to consider in evaluating the truth of his claim that 'if the unbeliever seeks to know, they can know' aren't possible and so are utterly irrelevant rendering the statement simply false. [Actually as a matter of the logic of material implications, one might point out that statement turns out vacuously true because the antecedent is necessarily false and any material conditional with a false antecedent is true. But I can't see how vacuous truths would help in the current context.]
2) Supposing that he can overcome 1) another problem persists. We have no principled reason to think that all that matters to the culpability of unbelief (inexcusability) is the sense of 'can' that Anderson has in mind. As it's presented in his book, it's entirely arbitrary. Anderson wants to say that what it means that a nonbeliever can know that God exists is just that were they created by God to have a fundamentally different character, then they would seek and thus know that God exists. But that's is not only incredibly unnatural, one wonders why we should care what happens in possible worlds where a non believer like Bob is so fundamentally different. Why should that bear on Bob's culpability in the actual world? It certainly serves to patch a serious problem in Anderson's book, but it's not a reason to think it's true or the correct way to think of things.
I said that Anderson has got two responses in his book as it concerns total depravity/the fall + determinism in relation to clarity and inexcusability. One was to simply affirm compatibilism about responsibility and to privilege a strange sense in which even a non-believer can know what is clear. Here's his second response:
To use the Fall, or predestination, as an excuse becomes absurd: "I want to believe in God but cannot because my fallen nature keeps me from doing so," or "I want to believe in God but I cannot because God predestined me to unbelief." Both assume the truth of what they claim not to be able to believe in: "I believe that unbelief is a sin, and it is therefore false that God does not exist, and I believe that it is true that God does not exist," or "I believe that God exists and he is keeping me from believing that God exists" (43).He finds it logically inconsistent to imagine a non believer using the fact that they were created without the necessary (and sufficient) conditions for knowing what is clear, as an excuse for not believing or knowing what is clear. They would have to believe or know what is clear in order to do so, but by stipulation they don't so we've got a contradiction. Sometimes Gangdeans puts it in these terms, "you're never gonna find a nonbeliever saying to God that if only I was made differently I would believe in you." But this is no good. In fact, it boggles my mind that Gangdeanians accept this as a sufficient answer.
Importantly, the issue at hand is how we should understand what it means for someone to "have an excuse" and hence what it means that some state or action is "inexcusable for an agent". But we must not lose sight of the context within which we are addressing these. To me, Anderson takes "giving an excuse" in a very narrow and unmotivated way. For him, for Bob to have an excuse = Bob must, by his own lights, be able to coherently articulate an excuse. That works fine to patch up a problem in his book, but it simply misses the larger point. Remember, the inexcusability of unbelief in relation to clarity was proposed by Anderson to make the maximal consequences of unbelief and the need for redemption (per Christianity) accord well with God's divine attributes like his goodness or justice. This is why I suspect that he's got the intuition that maximal consequences imply maximal clarity. And I say this because otherwise, there's simply no project for Gangadean and his camp to start. If they thought that it was entirely consistent with God's attributes for God to hold people responsible for unbelief, even if His existence isn't epistemically clear, then there would be no need for anything the like the clarity thesis to begin with. There just wouldn't be a problem to solve or a tension to resolve.
So what we really want to know when we ask, "is unbelief excusable?" is not whether a non believer can, herself, from her own perspective, intelligibly articulate an excuse to God for unbelief. Again there's just no reason to accept such a restricted reading of "having an excuse" and this misses the forest for the trees. Instead what we want to know is whether it is ultimately fair or just of God to hold persons morally responsible or guilty for unbelief when their unbelief is ultimately a result of His design or up to Him. We should, as third parties, evaluate whether God's divine attributes, His justice and perfect goodness are ultimately compatible with His creation of non-believers who He has "fearfully and wonderfully made" to never seek, and live in spiritual death forevermore. Note that appealing to our current practices of holding people responsible for actions won't do. Assuming that our world is a deterministic one like Gangdean and Anderson do, they might be tempted to point out that we in fact hold people morally responsible for actions even though we recognize that ultimately people act out of their "true characters" which in turn is beyond their doing (again because non of us are self-determined creatures). Now stated in this way we've got a descriptive fact about how we as humans, living in a societies act. But it could be that we're thinking about moral responsibility all wrong, if determinism is true (i.e., the normative question remains open). Furthermore, none of us had anything to do with determining the "true characters" of one another. But God has played this role as the author of life according to Anderson. So perhaps people have excuses before God, for what they do because God is the ultimate determiner, it is His will which is realized by even the nonbeliever, which is crucially why I think the nonbeliever has got about as strong an excuse for unbelief as is possible. But the same cannot be said as it concerns two or more determined beings who aren't responsible for determining the "truth characters" of one another.
Secondly, Anderson and Gangadean have this view that the unregenerated nonbeliever in "this life", will never recognize basic things such as God's existence, not during the judgment nor in the "afterlife". I take it that perhaps this has something to do with their view that spiritual death is not something that is future and imposed, but that it is current and inherent in not seeking or using reason to the fullest. However, I have no idea how the two are related--there doesn't seem any sort of necessary connection. Importantly, it's only when we buy into such a picture that it seems absurd for a nonbeliever (who always remains a nonbeliever) to say anything to God whatsoever. Again I think this is ultimately a red herring, but still for good measure here's my response. Notice we can put pressure on the very presupposition which generates the contradiction. Anderson and Gangadean must demonstrate that the unregenerated nonbeliver must always and forever be a nonbeliever, even at the judgment or the afterlife or whatever. But this is a contentious claim. I don't know how they would come to prove a thing like that (recall, that according to the bible the demons in hell know that God exists and shudder at his name). If they appeal to scripture, then they've got to prove their interpretation of it against more standard interpretations (and of course, I don't think anything like this can be proven even in principle). I think that scripture isn't going to give us anything like a deductive proof for such details. Now many Christians think that all humans, both believing and non-believing in this life will one day come before the judgment seat of God and all will recognize that He is. And on such a picture there simply is no contradiction or absurdity in thinking that a person who lived through and through as a non-believer now sees that God is. Thus there's nothing logically incoherent about such a person making an excuse for their life as a non-believer in the past (or pre-judgment). Here, the fact that God has determined them to not seek, and then chosen not to give them Grace and regenerate them so that it's impossible for them to seek, seems like a pretty good excuse to me. My point is, Anderson seems to have slipped in his own disputable presupposition in order to generate the contradiction of the nonbeliever giving an excuse. But he hasn't given us anything like a proof to accept it and he ought to.
Finally, I suspect Anderson and company will want to challenge possible-worlds semantics or at least my articulation of it. But then they owe us specifics. Where does my fairly minimal reliance on such semantics go wrong? And if they want to throw out the entire system, then they had better offer a replacement. At least insofar as we think statements, even counterfactuals and expressions with modals, have truth-conditions, we want a coherent theory.
The notion that basic things must be clear is pervasive in Gangadeanian philosophy. It is one of the core disagreements between Gangadean and me. I've challenged the notion that clarity is necessary since he's never given any demonstrative (non question begging) reason to believe his claim that thought, talk, knowledge, meaning, etc are impossible without clarity. I've also challenged the idea that such clarity is possible or actual. In this post I hope to have shown that clarity in the sense that Gangadean (and Anderson) presents is not even sufficient for the inexcusability of unbelief. It can be clear and yet the unbeliever can have a legitimate excuse (even if he himself isn't in a position to articulate it) for failing to believe.
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