Review of "The Evidence for God: Religious Knowledge Reexamined" more

354 Theology, Ethics and Philosophy The Evidence for God: Religious Knowledge Reexamined, Paul K. Moser, Cambridge University Press, 2009 (ISBN 978-0-521-51656-3 hb; 978-0-521-73628-2 pb), ii + 266 pp., hb $85.00, pb $24.99 Paul K. Moser, professor and chair of the philosophy department at Loyola University Chicago, has written a new book analyzing and constructing what he considers to be a novel approach to religious epistemology and the problems surrounding belief in God. He begins by describing what he calls a ‘new perspective’, ‘in which humans themselves are put under moral question, before God’s authority, in raising the question of whether God exists’ (p. ix). This ‘new perspective’ puts aside the more speculative and abstract ways of approaching the question of God’s existence for a method that is ‘morally and existentially challenging to us humans’ (p. 1). For Moser, when humans respond willingly to God and engage in thoughts on God’s moral nature ‘the evidence becomes salient’ (p. 2). He calls this evidence the ‘personifying evidence for God’ because ‘it requires the evidence to be personified in an intentional agent, such as a purposive human, and thereby to be evidence inherently of an intentional agent’ (p. 2). For Moser abstract and vague concepts of God do a kind of injustice to the title ‘God’ because, as Moser points out, ‘God signifies a being worthy of worship’ and ‘worthiness of worship is, of course, maximally morally demanding. It requires inherent moral perfection’ (p. 22). Thus, ‘moral defects bar a candidate from the status of being God, automatically and decisively’ (p. 24, Moser thinks Jesus is the only one who meets this bar because of Jesus’ emphasis on enemy-love, p. 114). True moral perfection entails intentionality since ‘morally righteous love aims to culminate in beneficial intentional actions toward others’ (p. 25). This means, so far, that Moser’s God is a moral and intentional God. God is also relational and revelatory in that God would also seek to spread his/her perfect love by transforming humans with it, and to do so would entail some form of divine interaction and intervention. If we thought of God as ‘morally indefinite’ we might be committing what Moser calls ‘cognitive idolatry’ ‘whereby we use cognitive standards that displace God’s cognitive and moral supremacy’ (p. 28). For Moser, given this picture of a moral and intentional God, we should expect evidence of God’s existence ‘only in a manner suitable to divine purposes’. God’s suitable manner ‘demands that inquirers become sensitive to the character and purposes of an authoritative, perfectly loving God’ (p. 40). All of this runs contrary to what Moser calls ‘nontheistic naturalism’. Moser wonders whether the natural sciences exclude the idea of a purposive agent and concludes that to prove this ‘would yield a difficult task for the natural sciences’ (p. 49). Moser then examines the notion of ontological naturalism and its varieties like: (1) eliminative © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Theology, Ethics and Philosophy 355 ontological naturalism; (2) noneliminative reductive ontological naturalism; and (3) noneliminative nonreductive ontological naturalism (p. 71). Moser examines these positions for the pertinent reason that ‘if ontological naturalism is true, then God does not exist’ (p. 72). Ontological naturalism and methodological naturalism Moser lumps together under the phrase ‘Core Scientism’ (p. 77). Moser sees Core Scientism as a position that seeks to establish a criterion for what is scientific versus unscientific, real versus unreal, etc. Core scientism also relies heavily on the idea of ‘hypothetically completed natural sciences’ (p. 78). That is, once the natural sciences have done their job, according to Core Scientism, we will need no further explanations of the nature and behavior of ontological entities. Moser thinks that Core scientism is not a justifiable position because it extends beyond science (via induction) to a complete metaphysical position about reality. It also cannot speak to the idea of a God who is outside empirical verification: ‘a God who is outside the domain of the empirical sciences could supply a kind of experiential evidence that does not fall under the category of the empirical sciences, perhaps because the evidence supplied by God is too elusive to be scientific’ (p. 81). Since God appears to be, by definition, beyond the scope of the empirical sciences, one must wonder whether or not evidence is needed to believe in God. After all, if God is so elusive perhaps the only way of approach is blind faith, or some form of fideism. Moser looks at what faith has traditionally meant by surveying a few key biblical passages (Gen. 12, 15) and the ideas of Soren Kierkegaard in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript and concludes that ‘faith on God therefore should not be characterized as an inward embracing of contradiction’ because that ‘undermines the important need for supporting evidence of the truth of any proposition accepted in faith’ (p. 98). On the other side of the coin, natural theology seeks to provide rational arguments for the existence of God based in reason and logic. Once it has made its arguments for why it is reasonable to believe that God exists, it has had a difficult time going beyond this to say what God is like. For Moser these arguments ‘need to establish the existence of a personal agent who is worthy of worship’ (p. 152, italics his), but, as history has shown, these arguments cannot go so far. Similarly, the arguments presented by natural theology do not confront humans in their personal moral lives and challenge them to be transformed. They are, according to Moser, ‘evidence for mere spectators’ (p. 159). Moser’s new book adds existentially and morally focused arguments for God’s reality alongside the more ‘rationalist’ methods for establishing God’s existence. It is an invaluable addition to anyone interested in existential theology. But this focus is not as novel as Moser thinks. It has existed in some form in Pascal, Kierkegaard, Bultmann, and Buber. It revises St Anselm of Canterbury’s notion that ‘I believe so that I may © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 356 Theology, Ethics and Philosophy understand’ (Lt. Credo ut Intelligam) to something like: ‘One must be volitionally and morally open to God in order for the evidence of God’s existence and moral nature to be salient’. To me this seems to beg the question. As Karl Popper has pointed out in the past, it is always easy, once someone has assumed a worldview, to find confirming evidence all around you (he speaks in reference to Freud’s psychoanalysis and Marx’s political philosophy). It is much harder to provide an argument that can be falsified, or proven wrong. Similarly, many apophatic and agnostic theologians would challenge the ideas that God is morally perfect and personal, because morality and personhood are finite predicates and cannot be applied to an infinite being. If God is truly transcendent it seems that God would also transcend our ideas of God. But this is for another time. For now, Moser’s book is worthy of attention, is written clearly and informatively, but is not as novel as it could be. Kile Jones Boston University Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11, Andrew R. Murphy, Oxford University Press, 2009 (ISBN 978-0-19-532128-9), x + 232 pp., hb $29.95 The presence of the religious jeremiad in America’s storied history, as well as in contemporary life, is indelible. Nevertheless, many dismiss the American jeremiad as either an artifact of the country’s JudeoChristian past or nothing more than the present, ideological pontifications of right-wing cadres. However, Andrew R. Murphy’s Prodigal Nation proposes that the influence of the American jeremiad reaches far beyond a mere bygone era or the caviling of a conservative few consistently manifesting itself in the political rhetoric of all Americans, past and present, left and right. The work is divided into two movements: the first surveys three significant junctures in the life of the American jeremiad, and the second critically describes the jeremiad’s dynamics in cultural practice. Before beginning this bipartite task, Murphy dedicates the first chapter to establishing a heuristic definition of the term, ‘jeremiad’. He suggests that jeremiads (1) implicate moral degeneracy relative to the past; (2) signal turning points in the cultural climate; and (3) demand reform. In addition, the jeremiad’s permanent relevance has been located in its ability to translate two fundamental American ideas – that of present despair and future hope – into a ‘powerful narrative of imperiled © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.