Natural Theology — a response to Moser

Natural Theology: Five Views
John C. McDowell, Alister E. McGrath, Paul K. Moser,
Fr. Andrew Pinsent, & Charles Taliaferro

What follows is a response primarily to Moser’s chapter in the above work, which defends a so-called “Deflationary View” of natural theology. McGrath, Pinsent, and Taliaferro’s chapters in this volume are well worth reading; I haven’t quite finished reading McDowell’s chapter yet, so I apologize if I fail to mention any relevant points made there. I wrote this mostly to help me clarify my own views.

I recently read David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God. In it, Hart aims to set out a commonplace definition of “God” that would be recognizable to the great theistic traditions of the world — specifically Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism. This is not normally a premise I would consider particularly promising — I have deep skepticism of any interfaith dialogue that starts from the position that all religions have the same origin, which I feel tends to flatten out all of the truly interesting details and stop productive conversation before it even begins — but I’ve found Hart’s other theological writing compelling enough that I was willing to give it a shot. I’m very glad I did — the book has had a profound effect on my faith. I hope to write more about that at some point, but I’m still very much feeling out the scope of that effect and not quite ready to commit anything to (virtual) paper.

The Christian elements of The Experience of God draw heavily on Aquinas (and Thomistic theology in general) and amount to an overview of contemporary arguments in what is generally called “natural theology” — knowledge about God reached without reference to Scripture or other special revelation, using only human rationality and experience of the world as a starting point.¹ I’ve always been interested in and sympathetic to natural theology as a discipline while also being vaguely aware that it was controversial — many theologians argue that it is at best a pointless exercise, at worst an act of hubris akin to the Tower of Babel. So when I happened upon this book on the library shelf, I was excited to learn more about these varied viewpoints.

In this volume, Paul Moser presents what he refers to as the “Deflationary View” of natural theology. That is, he aims to deflate the claims of natural theology, arguing that no natural theologian has ever successfully given evidence for, or knowledge of, a God worthy of worship. It’s not that he defends some other theological principle that he believes undermines the practice of natural theology from the start — rather, he thinks that on its own terms, natural theology cannot possibly deliver on its goals.

Most serious natural theologians specifically disavow natural theology’s ability to deliver us a full, rich picture of the God of Abraham and Jesus.² For that, we must rely on special revelation. But modern Thomists and others do defend natural theology’s ability to deliver a partial picture of God, and argue that getting that partial picture is still worthwhile even in the face of the richer picture given by Scripture — because it has confirmatory value that may strengthen a believer’s faith, because it provides more neutral language for discussing that faith outside of the specific community of believers, or for any number of other reasons. As far as I can tell, Moser does not see a distinction between incomplete and incorrect knowledge of God: because natural theology does not and cannot deliver a complete picture God, he seems to feel that it is inherently misleading to believer and nonbeliever alike. Pinsent and McGrath do point this out in their responses to the essay, but Moser seems to dismiss their concerns. I find this somewhat frustrating, but for the sake of argument I’m willing to entertain the idea that, insofar as the conclusions of natural theology are a subset of the conclusions of “supernatural” theology, we could perhaps dispense with the former entirely. However, even granting that, I find I disagree with Moser’s position.

Moser says that natural theological arguments (for example, Aquinas’ Five Ways or Anselm’s so-called Ontological Argument) can only show us a sterile “god of the philosophers”, not a god truly “worthy of worship”. This is a common complaint, and (modulo my remarks about incomplete vs incorrect knowledge above) I think a valid one: None of these arguments can possibility tell us anything about grace and salvation. However, the specific formulation that Moser uses (over and over again) is to argue that natural theology cannot show us the existence of a “morally perfect intentional agent”. Moser’s objection rests, I think, on the following two claims:

1. For an entity to be worthy of worship, it is necessary and sufficient for that entity to be a morally perfect intentional agent.
2. The only evidence for the moral agency of God that is possible (without reference to Scripture) is direct relational experience — i.e. the experience of being lead by God into a moral stance.

I find both of these claims problematic in different ways. I’ll tackle them in reverse order.

On evidence from direct experience

The only kind of evidence for God (outside of Scripture) that Moser will admit is relational, I-Thou experience. I can say first-hand that this kind of direct experience is deeply compelling — my own faith rests on one initial experience calling me into relationship with the Divine, followed by decades of a slow working-out of that relationship. (Though, as I’ll discuss below, my own initial experience is of a distinctly different character than the “moral leading” that Moser counts as evidential.) But the problem with I-Thou experiences is that they are, by definition, accessible only to the “I” and the “Thou”; direct experiences of the Divine are notoriously difficult to communicate to others, even believers from within the same narrow tradition. E. L. Mascall, for instance, spends a chapter of He Who Is arguing that direct experience is the strongest possible private evidence for the Divine, but then dismisses all such experiences as worthless for public discussion: Private experience cannot constitute public evidence.

The question then must be, why should we expect public evidence? Moser’s answer is that we shouldn’t: To expect public evidence of God, available to all, is to deny that God has the agency to disclose themself to some and not others (or at some times and not others). For Moser, this selective disclosure is necessary because God is morally perfect and thus will remain hidden if revealing themself would only cause more harm; even if you find this a somewhat dubious premise, traditional theism would agree that God’s freedom is absolute and thus they must have the option to remain hidden. I think a reasonable reply in defense of natural theology would be to say that, by making humanity in their image, God already revealed themself to all; our ability to do natural theology at all relies on God’s choice to allow it. In other words, the existence of public evidence for God is not a limitation on God’s agency, but a sign of God’s freely-willed choice.³

Even if public evidence is available, why should we care about it? Moser, obviously, thinks we shouldn’t; I would argue that we should, specifically because of humanity’s fallen state: Humans are remarkably good at lying to themselves. I don’t know whether I particularly believe in original sin as classically defined, but if I did I think that I would have to point to the capacity for self-delusion as its clearest expression. If it serves us in some way to believe something, it becomes very easy to convince ourselves of it. A healthy self-doubt is the only antidote. Given this, the confirmatory value of public evidence for God cannot be understated. This value is noted by a number of the contributors to this volume, but I think the point isn’t emphasized strongly enough: Even if natural theology can never give us a true second-person experience of God on its own, it can be immensely useful in helping us to trust those experiences (i.e. trust ourselves) when they do happen.⁴

Of course, Moser is concerned primarily with one particular kind of experience, namely moral leading. I don’t think this is because he believes that only that kind of experience is possible or valuable, but rather because he believes that only the moral experience matters when determining whether an entity is worthy of worship. I’ll turn to this claim next.

On moral perfection

Moser states (repeatedly) that unless an entity is morally perfect, that entity is not worthy of worship. In the context of his statements that only direct personal experience counts as evidence, I find it very difficult to know how to evaluate “moral perfection” in a way that avoids potential self-delusion; but if we grant that such a thing is possible, I think this claim is correct — a morally-imperfect god is not God. Where I feel Moser runs into very serious trouble is when he appears to claim that, in fact, moral perfection is the only measure of whether an intentional agent is worthy of worship.

That seems like a very extreme statement, but I don’t think I’m constructing a straw-man here. In footnote 20, Moser states this pretty plainly:

We need not require omnipotence, omniscience, immutability, or (timeless) eternality of an intentional agent worthy of worship, contrary to a long-standing tradition among monotheists; for relevant discussion, see Moser, “Attributes of God”.

In fairness to Moser⁵, he does state elsewhere in the essay that “[a]bsence of moral defect in the agent would indicate a morally perfect agent at work, perhaps even an agent worthy of worship.” (Emphasis mine.) This implies that there is some other criterion for determining worship-worthiness. However, he does not elaborate on what that might be, and the footnote quoted above clearly states that, whatever it is, it isn’t any of the traditional theistic attributes of God.

The difficulty with elevating moral perfection to this degree, as I see it, is that it is not at all obvious that moral perfection is a uniquely distinguishing characteristic: Why shouldn’t there be multiple morally perfect intentional agents in the world? If there were, would they all be worthy of worship? Or can we appeal to some other criterion to distinguish which is God?

At the start of his chapter, Moser responds to many of the common classes of arguments of natural theology. With most of them, he finds specific logical issues that render the argument invalid, and I’m broadly in agreement with him on these points. There’s one class of arguments, though, where his objection is a little more complicated, specifically the class that he terms the “First-Cause Arguments”, typified by Aquinas’ Five Ways. It’s worth digressing into the nature of the Five Ways briefly at this point, in order to really highlight the error I believe Moser commits in his own argument.

The most familiar of the Five Ways to a lay-person is probably the “Unmoved Mover” argument, which is typically presented as an argument for the existence of God:

Everything in motion was set in motion by something else; some things that we experience are in motion; therefore there must be some ultimate Unmoved Mover that set the first thing in motion.

Having now spent a little time reading about the Five Ways, I can say that the actual argument presented by Aquinas is quite a bit more subtle than this, in ways that I’m sure I’m only just beginning to understand. For example: in the original argument “movement” really refers to any change; there’s a significant digression into Aristotelian philosophy of change and identity; and the argument explicitly allows for the idea that the chain of movement might be infinite (but still require a logical antecedent). Regardless, however, there’s something notable missing from the caricature of the argument I gave above: For all that the Unmoved Mover argument is usually presented as an argument for the existence of God, it conspicuously fails to mention God.

In this, my presentation above is actually quite faithful to Aquinas’ original formulation. Each of the Five Ways offers an argument with a very similar schema to the Unmoved Mover argument,⁶ with no reference to God. Each of the Five Ways then ends with:

and this [e.g. the Unmoved Mover] is what everyone calls God.

E. L. Mascall says that this formulation reflects Aquinas’ actual aims with the Five Ways: They are not offered as proofs of God’s existence, but rather as distinct ways in which rationality can teach us about the God we already believe to exist. When the Five Ways and natural theology in general are seen in this light, some of the arguments against them lose their teeth — natural theology is not concerned with proving or disproving the existence of God, but rather with using one’s God-given Rationality to better understand faith acquired through direct experience of the Divine.

Moser does not seem to interpret the Five Ways like this:

Skeptics rightly balk at that reference to God, and we should too, given the exalted demands of morally perfect personal agency for satisfying the title “God.” If an argument does not support affirming the existence of a morally perfect intentional agent, then that argument does not confirm that God exists. Arguments of natural theology often run afoul of this fact and leave one without evidence for the existence of God.

As I’ve stated, I think this is a misinterpretation of Aquinas’ intentions and as such critiques the Five Ways based on criteria that they were not designed to meet. However, I think the most important thing is this: Moser seems to grant that the rest of the Unmoved Mover argument goes through. That is, there must be some transcendent Unmoved Mover; he just doesn’t believe we have enough evidence to call that entity “God”.

Seen in this light, Moser’s statement that we need not assume many of the classical attributes of God (i.e. transcendence) is deeply worrying. His position seems to be compatible with a world in which there is a transcendent entity, the Creator and Sustainer of the cosmos and the ground of all being, who created (along with humans and everything else that exists) a morally perfect intentional agent who interacts with humans and who we should worship as God. This is idolatry — effectively, a belief in a demiurge. I don’t see how this position is compatible with any received sacred tradition, least of all Scripture.

I imagine that Moser would reply that of course there is no demiurge — Scripture is quite clear on this point, and the morally perfect agent that he has experienced is the God of scripture. I’m not entirely sure how you make that identification unless the direct experience is also one of transcendence — it seems roughly as justified as Aquinas’ (misinterpreted) final statement. I think it would be (frankly unwarrantedly) charitable to give Moser’s arguments the reading he does not grant Aquinas (that is, to treat them as ways of knowing something about the God we already believe in); but even if we were to do so, I think that would rob his arguments of any value: Certainly, if the point of reasoning our way to knowledge of God is to confirm our direct second-person experiences, an argument that relies on those same experiences has little use.

On my own experience

I promised, above, to discuss my own personal experience of God. As I’ve said multiple times, direct I-Thou experiences are by their very nature incommunicable, so at some level this is an exercise in futility; I don’t expect that hearing about my experience will convince a skeptic of God’s existence, or even another Christian of my specific understanding. But I find it edifying to draw a contrast between my experience and the experiences Moser relies on; perhaps that, at least, will be interesting to others.

In the years leading up to my conversion, I was very concerned with the idea of “meaningful experiences”. It seemed evident to me from my own life that an experience might profoundly shape one’s life in positive ways without being a happy one. Of course, happy experiences might also be meaningful; but if meaning wasn’t synonymous with joy (or success or satisfaction), then what was it? Where did it come from? What made an experience meaningful?

I spent a lot of time thinking about ways that meaning could arise. Maybe it was about how well an experience fit into and expanded on an existing narrative, or maybe it was a function purely of the depth of emotion it provoked, or maybe it emerged in some mysterious way from the way your decisions reinforced or undermined other people’s decisions. None of these explanations seemed correct or complete; I struggled even to fully define what “meaning” meant.

On the day of my conversion — and yes, I remember down to the minute when this happened — the insight came to me that I had things backwards: Meaning was the primitive, the axiom, from which other things were formed. Narratives, emotions, decisions, and all the other things I had considered as possible sources of meaning were simply forms meaning could take. I immediately understood this to be a statement about immanence — meaning in some sense underlies and constitutes all experiences, provides the ground of their being. And I had an intuition (based on a visual metaphor of points and circles, familiar from compass and straight-edge constructions) that immanence and transcendence were two ways of describing one property: If meaning is the ground of all being, than it is also beyond being, beyond the things we know and experience. And that, as Aquinas says, is what everyone calls God.

That was it. That was the moment that made me a convicted theist. It didn’t immediately make me a convicted Christian — that would take several years and direct experiences of the power of saving grace. I have had the sort of moral experiences that Moser describes; I have experienced (and, frankly, continually experience) the simultaneous deep longing and profound gratitude for God’s forgiveness that I think is one of the cornerstones of Christian life. But that first experience was one that might be described as an experience of natural theology. It felt inevitable, like I had reasoned my way to a conclusion: A transcendent God existed.

I know that, presented in the form above, my experience doesn’t look like a rational step-by-step argument; it certainly doesn’t have logical force approaching that of the Five Ways. It relies, at multiple points, on insight, on a creative leap from what I’ve already experienced to something new. And even at the time, this property is what made it feel like a dialogue: I posed questions and stated premises, and God granted me the insight to continue reasoning. It had the feel of working with a skilled teacher, who waited until I was stuck and then gave just enough of a hint to help me on to the next step. I said at the time (or at least wrote in my journal — it was nearly a year before I mentioned any of this to another soul) that I had been granted a vision. I still feel a profound sense of awe and gratitude thinking about that moment, even 20 years later. It changed the course of my life irrevocably.

Hopefully this gets across just how deeply sympathetic to Moser’s position I am. I, too, was convicted of my faith by a direct second-person experience of the divine; I, too, feel skeptical that human reason can possibly reach God without God’s intervention. But I categorically reject the idea that moral perfection is the only necessary and sufficient property that makes God worthy of worship. For years after my vision, I was not convinced that God had any moral character that humans could understand; and yet the awe and gratitude I felt for God’s presence in my life left me with no doubt that God was worthy of worship. And I do feel quite strongly that God gave humans reason enough to know God, at least in the woefully incomplete way that any finite being can be said to “know” the infinite. Today, a bit more than 20 years after that vision, I find great value in Aquinas’ Five Ways, and in natural theology in general. I continue to find parallels between my own vision and the thinking of other Christians, and every time I do it gives me that same feeling of awe: They, though often separated from me by centuries and continents, were granted similar experiences of the living God. Maybe this, more than confirmation, is the deepest value of natural theology: It gives us the tools to find correlations between our deeply personal, incommunicable experiences of the divine. It gives us public language with which to knit together the Body of Christ.