Main authors discussed: John Calvin, Alvin Plantinga, William Rowe

Reformed epistemology often is thought to be on the opposite end of the theological spectrum from, if not outright opposed to, natural theology.  Johnson, however, aims to demonstrate that Calvin’s view of a universal “sense of deity” may be just what natural theologians need to defend the ontological and cosmological arguments against the common objection of being question-begging.  Johnson’s strategy is to contend that even though these arguments may be question-begging in some sense—epistemically, perhaps—their key premises may be justified nonetheless, and thus, it may under certain conditions be reasonable for an individual to find the arguments persuasive.  Johnson does not here try to argue that Calvin’s view is correct, but rather that if Calvin’s view is correct, it provides “a powerful account of the usefulness of natural theology” (88).

Johnson begins with some preliminary remarks about what the Calvinist view involves.  Most importantly, he notes that on Calvin’s view—which Calvin apparently based on his interpretation of Romans 1—the sense of deity includes knowledge of God’s “eternal power and nature,” not merely God’s existence, and it “involves actual knowledge which can be suppressed, not merely the potential for knowledge” (88).  These points prove crucial for Johnson’s later arguments, along with the point that on Calvin’s view the sense of deity is universal.

With these assumptions in place, Johnson turns to Plantinga’s version of the ontological argument, on which the existence of a maximally great being is derived from the key premise, (1) “Possibly, a maximally great being exists.”  The standard response to the argument is that it begs the question.  Johnson does not offer much in the way of explanation of why the argument is commonly thought to be question begging, but the usual reasoning, I take it, is that one could not be justified in accepting (1) apart from one’s (logically prior) acceptance of the argument’s conclusion (“A maximally great being exists”).  As Johnson points out, a parallel argument can be constructed in which the denial of God’s existence can be derived from (1’) “Possibly, a maximally great being fails to exist.”  To anyone who understands this, it is obvious that (1) and (1’) cannot both be true, and thus it appears that one needs some principled reason for accepting (1) over (1’) if one is to be rational in finding the ontological argument persuasive.  According to critics, the only compelling reason to accept (1) over (1’) is that (1) is entailed by the proposition that God exists; if one accepts that God exists, one should accept (1) and reject (1’).  But since the proposition that God exists is the conclusion of the ontological argument, (1) cannot provide rational justification for accepting that God exists, contrary to what the ontological argument suggests.  The ontological argument thus begs the question; it is epistemically circular.

Of course, the claim that (1) cannot be justified apart from the presumption of theism is controversial, and some have tried to argue that it enjoys independent rational support.  But Johnson’s view is that the argument may not be useless even if it is epistemically circular.  If Calvin is right about the sense of deity, then knowledge of God is the default state of human beings, and a state of unbelief is acquired only by a certain kind of (sinful) doxastic effort.  This provides the foundations for Johnson’s central argument.  He claims that one’s “suppression of the sense of deity is most unnatural (because sinful) and dramatically difficult (perhaps impossible) to do with consistency” (90).  Because of the difficulty of the task, it is likely that, in some cases, it will not be done entirely consistently or thoroughly.  Certain beliefs that depend on belief in God for their justification might remain in such an individual’s web of beliefs, and in some cases, proposition (1) might be one of these residual beliefs—a proposition “accepted by someone who has only partially succeeded in suppressing his or her sense of deity” (90).  In short, the key premise of the ontological argument may be justified for certain lapsed believers (and Calvin’s view suggests that all unbelievers are lapsed believers): namely, for those who retain belief in the (mere) possibility of God’s existence as a kind of residual belief which survives their suppression of the sense of deity and the knowledge it provides.  As Johnson puts it, “This doubter may have suspended judgment about or even disbelieved the existence of God while retaining a belief that God’s existence is possible, despite having arrived at the possibility belief originally by virtue of the sense of deity” (90).

So the scenario Johnson seems to be describing is this: an individual first believes that P (“God exists”), then believes that Q (“Possibly, God exists”) on the basis of its being obviously entailed by P, then ceases to believe that P while retaining a belief that Q, then realizes (via the ontological argument) that Q entails P, and finally reaccepts P on the basis of this realization.  Johnson concludes: “The ontological argument may reasonably persuade such a person” (90).

One might worry that a belief that Q could never be justified for an individual in this manner.  Johnson admits that his account “assumes that it is rational to continue to believe something after having forgotten or rejected (or suppressed) the original ground for that belief” (91), but he thinks he can demonstrate that this assumption is plausible.  He produces a compelling counterexample (which he credits to Alexander Pruss) which demonstrates that one could be justified in believing a proposition for which one has forgotten one’s original grounds for acceptance.  But there is good reason for readers not yet to be convinced.  Accepting a proposition for which one has forgotten one’s original justifying grounds is crucially different from accepting a proposition for which one now rejects one’s original justifying grounds.

Johnson goes on to apply the same strategy to the cosmological argument, appealing to the sense of deity to justify acceptance of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), understood as “the thesis that all contingent facts have an explanation” (93).  But here his argument faces an additional obstacle.  Johnson suggests that this version of the PSR is straightforwardly implied by God’s existence (93), but this is controversial at best.  A theological compatibilist might accept this inference, but Reformed epistemologists are often libertarians, and many would contend that the PSR is false precisely on the grounds that libertarian free choices do not satisfy its requirements.  Such theists are not likely to find Johnson’s defense of the cosmological argument convincing, and the same objection is available to non-theist critics, as well.

Reviewed by R. Zachary Manis
Southwest Baptist University

Main authors discussed: Søren Kierkegaard, Johannes Climacus, William L. Rowe, Cardinal Newman, Karl Rahner

According to the standard reading, Søren Kierkegaard is a staunch critic of natural theology.  Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments, lampoons all attempts to “prove” God’s existence, and the views Climacus expresses in this text are, for good reason, commonly attributed to Kierkegaard himself.  Furthermore, as C. Stephen Evans has argued at length (see especially chapters 10 and 11 of Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays), Kierkegaard’s thought bears a marked resemblance to Reformed epistemology as defended by John Calvin and, more recently, by Alvin Plantinga, who hold that belief in God is warranted on the basis of an immediate—that is, non-inferential—awareness of divinity (sensus divinitatis).  In this paper, however, Mulder revisits the issue of Kierkegaard’s relation to natural theology and, more generally, to the Catholic tradition, in the hopes that “this encounter between two unlikely allies can serve as a helpful propaedeutic for similar rapprochement between natural theologians and the kinds of Reformed epistemologists that have been skeptical of natural theology” (43-4).

Mulder begins with a discussion of Climacus’s attack on natural theology in Philosophical Fragments.  On Mulder’s analysis, Climacus’s objection can be separated into two facets: the “Foolishness Objection,” and the “Infelicity Objection” (46).  The former objection contends that attempts to prove God’s existence are foolish on the grounds that “if we undertook to demonstrate the existence of God we would not be taking God’s existence to be a doubtful postulate—since then we would never ‘begin’” (46).  The latter objection contends that any attempt to demonstrate that some mysterious entity is in fact God is a pointless exercise that will convince no one of God’s existence, because the mysterious entity in question is one whose existence is not doubted.  Mulder concludes that the latter is not very serious; the former is “the real issue in considering Climacus’s criticism” (47).

How are we to understand the Foolishness Objection?  What does it mean to say that we would never “begin” the argument if we took God’s existence to be doubtful?  Mulder explains: “The reason that Climacus thinks we would never begin is that we would be using God’s works (i.e., creation) to prove the existence of a Creator, but the argument would never get off the ground were it not to premise that the works in question are precisely God’s works, which would not themselves exist without God” (47).  The objection appears to be a very dubious one—why think that we must simply assume that events within creation are God’s works?—but Mulder contends that it is “more interesting than it looks at first” (47).  What the objection points to, Mulder suggests, is that the problem of evil plagues attempts to establish God’s existence via arguments from design.  Unless we have some independent reason for thinking that God exists, we must admit that nature, with all of its apparently gratuitous and pointless evil and suffering, appears not to be the work of an all powerful, perfectly good Creator.  But if we do have some independent reason to think that God exists, then appeals to design arguments are superfluous.

Mulder points out, however, that while Climacus apparently intends this to be a critique of all proofs of God’s existence (or, more charitably, of all a posteriori proofs), it is not clear that it has the same force against the cosmological argument; thus Climacus’s attack on natural theology in Philosophical Fragments is at best incomplete (49).  More importantly, though, Climacus’s attacks on natural theology—whether successful or not—should not lead us to immediately conclude that Climacus (or Kierkegaard) is hostile to all attempts to ground belief in God apart from special revelation.  In fact, there is a kind of “natural” knowledge of God to which Climacus seems sympathetic.  One comes to knowledge of God not through proofs, but rather “by actively relating to one’s own life with passion” (50).  This is the kernel of truth in Climacus’s critique of natural theology, Mulder thinks: it is “a narrow (if erroneous) instance of a wider (and ultimately correct, in my view) suspicion of reason’s capabilities in relation to faith” (51).

So far, so good.  But in subsequent sections, “Natural Theology and Epistemology in the Catholic Tradition” (section 3) and “Natural Reason in Kierkegaard and Catholic Theology” (section 4), Mulder turns to a host of different topics, ranging from the official Catholic position on natural theology (52-3), to a discussion of William Rowe’s version of the cosmological argument and the Church’s view on knowledge of metaphysical principles, such as the Principle of Sufficient Reason (53-4), to Aquinas on natural reason (55), John I. Jenkins on basic beliefs (55-7), Stephen R. Grimm’s views about the relation of Cadinal Newman to Reformed epistemology (57-8), and Karl Rahner’s views about transcendental knowledge of God (59).  The reader is often left wondering where Mulder is going with all this—at times, the discussion seems to lose sight of Kierkegaard altogether—and, in the end, left uncertain whether the myriad issues and figures that Mulder has addressed bear more than a loose connection to one another.  Though depth is sometimes a necessary sacrifice to achieve breadth, in this case the movement from one topic to the next is so fast that the discussion often feels scattered, and the reader is left to do too much of the work of trying to keep sight of the big picture.  Those readers who persevere to the final pages (60 ff.), however, will be rewarded with some passages that summarize and help to pull things together.

The relation of Kierkegaard to natural theology and Catholicism is an important and fascinating one, and there are interesting nuggets throughout this essay, as well as some genuinely deep insights.  Nevertheless, this essay at times demands of its readers a bit more patience than it should.

Reviewed by R. Zachary Manis
Southwest Baptist University