Recent Advances in Knowledge of God
Time was, philosophers were skeptics, looking down on the poor benighted masses, who think their opinions are knowledge when they really aren’t. Maybe Bloggs thinks there’s a tree in the courtyard, but ah, a brain in a vat that was fed experiences just like those he’s having would think the same. Since Bloggs has no more go to on than that brain, he doesn’t know that there’s a tree. Even if there is one, he’s only right by luck, or chance.
But the science of knowledge (what philosophers, with their irritating preference for obscure Greek words—see our name for our own discipline—call “epistemology”) has advanced a great deal, and the tables are turned. Skepticism is out; and those not up on the latest research are apt to be more, not less, skeptical than is warranted.
Take the moral domain. Poisoning Alexei Navalny (the Russian opposition leader) was wrong: we know this, right? Ah, but can’t you easily imagine—just read some history—a society where the ruthless elimination of one’s political opponents was widely approved? They would not judge that the poisoning was wrong. But we have no more to go on than they would; so even if the poisoning was wrong, we’re only right by luck, or chance.
This no more proves that we lack moral knowledge, than the brain-in-vat scenario proves we don’t know there’s a tree in the courtyard. Why the brain-in-vat scenario doesn’t prove that is too a long a story to tell here; roughly, remote possibilities of error, in which our belief-forming mechanisms are tricked or otherwise out of their element, do not preclude knowledge at home, where nothing funny is going on. The ruthlessness-approving society is like the brain-in-vat scenario, a remote possibility of moral error that does not defeat moral knowledge in our more conducive environment.
But how do we gain moral knowledge? Supposing there are trees and courtyards, and tables and chairs and the rest, we are able to describe and understand the process by which we come to know things about them. Can we really do the same for moral facts? Isn’t this where the disanalogy lies, and doesn’t it mean that we lack moral knowledge? Timothy Williamson argues in “Unexceptional Moral Knowledge” (which I draw on throughout) that we can do the same for moral knowledge. Consider, first, how the story goes for (ordinary) perceptual knowledge. Light bounces off the tree and enters our eyes, neurons fire, etc, producing the judgment (and also the knowledge) that there is a tree. We have the “capacity” to recognize trees. But our recognitional capacities go well beyond the abilities to recognize colors, shapes, and even trees. A chess master can know, by looking at the board, that white is in a bad position. Asked by the skeptic how they know, surely it’s enough to say that the chess master has acquired a capacity to recognize the quality of board-positions, and that capacity was activated when light bounces off the board and into his eyes and his neurons began to fire, producing the judgment (and knowledge) that white’s position is bad. Similarly, art aficionados have the capacity to recognize when a painting is by John Singer Sargent. The skeptic about moral knowledge can be answered the same way: we have a capacity to recognize right and wrong—a capacity no more obscure or doubtful than the chess master’s or the art critic’s capacity; and the rest of the answer is the same.
The point is that when I judge such-and-such, and this judgment is produced by a recognitional capacity, then that judgment is non-inferential: I did not reason my way to that judgment from more basic premises. (That’s not to deny that a lot of complex information-processing went on in my brain.) And the idea is that recognitional capacities, like the capacity to recognize trees, produce knowledge—and so that knowledge of things outside the mind, like trees, can be and often is non-inferential, not arrived at by reasoning from more basic premises (say, about how things appear, or about what sensations or mental states I am in). And the underappreciated consequence is that, if knowledge of trees can be non-inferential in this way, then so can moral knowledge.
Skeptics at this point sometimes appeal to the theory of evolution. Natural selection would favor moral beliefs that increased our fitness, rather than those that tracked the truth. Our moral beliefs are therefore unreliable, and so do not amount to knowledge. This is as good as the argument that natural selection would favor beliefs about the quality of chess positions (or the distribution of Sargent paintings) that increased our fitness, rather than those that tracked the truth—an argument that clearly does not cast our knowledge of the quality of chess positions into doubt.
Less discussed than it should be (as far as I’m aware—though in a way this summarizes the Philosopher Alvin Plantinga’s entire philosophical career) is the next step. If philosophy has developed techniques that first defeated skepticism about perceptual knowledge, and then skepticism about moral knowledge, what about knowledge of God—God’s existence, and/or God’s activity in the world? Yes, heathens with “just as much to go on” as Catholics do, have been atheists. But unless more is said, this is properly regarded by the believer as just another remote (and therefore irrelevant) skeptical scenario, the theological analogue of the brain-in-a-vat. And if reflection on the operation of natural selection on the human mind is no threat to moral knowledge, it’s surely no threat to religious knowledge either.
Most interesting to me is the “how do you know?” question. If God exists, by what process do theists come to know this? If the lesson above was that, in other domains, knowledge need not be based on an inference from some other, “safer” domain—knowledge of one’s own sensations, or knowledge of the “non-moral” facts—we should accept the same possibility here. This is a hard lesson to learn. The complaint is familiar enough, that one can only know God exists, if one has some proof, that is, some reasons one could write down or post to social media sites that justify that belief. But, the argument continues, “God is an unnecessary hypothesis”: any evidence one might bring forth for God’s existence could be just as well explained by an alternative, purely naturalistic hypothesis. This is a double-standard, demanding for religious knowledge something that not even perceptual knowledge achieves.
If we parry the demand for reasons, or evidence, in an answer to “how do you know God exists?”, we’ve so far just said that knowledge of God is or can be non-inferential. Some seem to stop here. Peter van Inwagen wrote, and thought it enough to say, that
As far as I can see, the reason I believe in God is that belief in God is built into me.
But this is not the only way. An alternative is to do for knowledge of God what Williamson did for knowledge of moral facts: appeal to recognitional capacities. Among our recognitional capacities are those that enable me to know, by looking, that you are not a robot, but a living thinking person. Indeed I can even know some of the contents of your mind, by observing the expressive features of your face and gesture. To say that this knowledge is the product of a recognitional capacity, again, is to say that I do not reason my way to that knowledge from more basic premises: I do not see that you are smiling, and from that infer that you are happy. Since our knowledge of other human minds, produced in this way, is secure, then (suppose that God exists) so too humans might have a knowledge-producing recognitional capacity which they exercise when they “perceive God” in sunsets, mountains, and thunderstorms.
Alvin Plantinga arrived at Harvard in 1950, and “encountered serious non-Christian thought for the first time.” He “began to wonder whether what I had always believed could really be true.” But then one dark and stormy winter night, walking through Harvard yard,
it was as if the heavens opened; I heard, so it seemed, music of overwhelming power and grandeur and sweetness; there was light of unimaginable splendor and beauty; it seemed I could see into heaven itself; and I suddenly saw or perhaps felt with great clarity and persuasion and conviction that the Lord was really there and was as I had thought. The effects of this experience lingered for a long time; I was still caught up in arguments about the existence of God, but they often seemed to me merely academic, of little existential concern, as if one were to argue about whether there has really been a past, for example, or whether there really were other people.
See also: Boy God; Ancient Footsteps, Like the Motion of the Sea.
I agree that, in theory, knowledge of God could come non-inferentially through some sort of "divine sense" or inbuilt veridical recognition of God's presence. However, I don't think this has much power to alter the philosophy of religion landscape for a few reasons:
1) There's nothing special about God here. *Anything* could, in theory, have some non-inferential capacity to recognize it built into human psychology. So we can't just accept claims about God's existence on the basis that maybe people who think God exists think so because of a special capacity to recognize God's existence. In principle, any argument of the form, "I just know it, through some non-inferential capacity," can only be used to assure people who already believe the claim to be true - it can never be used to convince a skeptic, unless the existence of the capacity can be convincingly demonstrated without needing to use the capacity itself - and even then, it can only assure people who believe the claim already if they have some reason to think that their belief is indeed the result of a non-inferential capacity, and there is no strong evidence undermining this claim.
2) It appears to me that there *is* strong evidence undermining the claim that we have a non-inferential capacity to recognize God. First of all, the divine sense must either be something we naturally have without needing to learn it, or something we learned. The former seems possible, since God could have put it in us, but there's no way we could learn to recognize God, unless we already have some other way of knowing that God exists. You can't learn how to recognize a good chess position without either having enough experience of the game where you saw which positions won and lost (thus giving you external confirmation of what types of positions are good or bad) or being able to reason your way to an explanation of why some positions are likely to lead to winning or losing. This is a problem for the idea that we have a veridical capacity to recognize God because belief in God is almost always learned. Most people are taught to believe in God by their parents or the surrounding culture. Not *everyone* learns to believe in God this way, but the vast majority who don't also start believing for reasons that are definitely unrelated to some non-inferential recognition capacity, such as liking a particular religious group/wanting the social benefits of being part of one, being convinced by philosophical arguments or miracle claims, or wanting the religious claims to be true, either because they feel it would give their life meaning or because they could have life after death. There are very few people who could plausibly be said to believe in God through some non-inferential recognition capacity that wasn't taught to them. At best, you could maybe say people who have religious experiences fall into this category, but even then, the way people interpret religious experiences is influenced by culture and the supernatural claims they have heard about before.
Second, we have the fact that many people don't have this divine recognition capability and are instead atheists and agnostics. These people are perfectly capable of navigating the world, reasoning, etc., without any more issues than theists. This would be quite strange if they were missing a key capacity. It would be as if blind people, despite lacking vision, had no apparent difficulties navigating the world. Also, given that the only plausible origin for the divine sense is that it was put in us by God, it doesn't make sense that anyone lacks it - did God just forget to put the divine sense in these people?
Third, we have the fact that for most of human history, people didn't believe in God. They believed in nature spirits or in polytheistic gods. You could argue that these beliefs were manifestations of the theistic recognitional capacity, but that would mean that the capacity is very weak and cannot be used on its own to establish monotheism, or even the existence of anything close to God (since the information we get from the capacity is at least ambiguous enough to be misinterpreted as mere nature spirits). Alternatively, you could argue that people did not have the capacity until the rise of monotheistic religions. This is pretty ad hoc, and of course it implies that divine sense coincidentally appeared at the exact same time that a perfectly naturalistic explanation of widespread theism - the belief in God being transmitted culturally, familially, and intellectually through generation - became available.
Fourth, even people who believe in God disagree on just about every possible claim about him, with virtually no claims having widespread consensus. The closest thing to consensus is achieved that things that are traditionally doctrines of the Abrahamic faiths, but there's an obvious reason why those things have consensus among members of the Abrahamic faiths that has nothing to do with some special capacity. Normally, if we have a veridical capacity to recognize that something exists, we can say a more about it than just that it exists, and everyone who has the capacity will agree on most of these things. After all, we tend to recognize these things by their features.
Fifth, I think the vast majority of theists would not, upon introspection, say that they believe in God because they have some built-in capacity to just recognize him. This certainly wasn't the case for me when I was a theist. The fact that even theistic philosophers have always assumed they need some argument or evidence for their position rather than treating it as obvious or something you can "just see" also suggests this.
Sixth, for most non-learned mental capacities, there's a region in the brain associated with them. Since non-inferential recognition of God can't be a learned faculty for the reasons mentioned above, it's quite strange that no region in the brain is associated with it.
Seventh, there are a lot of naturalistic reasons that explain away belief in God, and they are all based on things we actually know about evolution, history, etc. There aren't similar explanations for uncontroversial faculties like vision.
Eighth, the specific mechanism that you suggest of people being able to perceive God in mountains, sunsets, and thunderstorms, is obviously not real. The only people who "perceive God" in these things are people who already believe in God and see these phenomena as manifestations of his power, glory, or goodness. No one without some preexisting concept of God would come to believe in him just by looking at these things.
3) The idea that "heathens with 'just as much to go on' as Catholics do, have been atheists. But unless more is said, this is properly regarded by the believer as just another remote (and therefore irrelevant) skeptical scenario, the theological analogue of the brain-in-a-vat," is definitely not true. The brain-in-a-vat scenario is disregarded precisely because it's a remote scenario that never happens in real life that was specifically designed to give ad-hoc reasons why we would falsely believe all the things that appear to actually be true. That's quite different from an actually-existing scenario that lots of people are in that doesn't involve any ad-hoc postulates.
For the reasons stated, I think we have very strong evidence that there isn't a non-inferential capacity to recognize God, and that if there is, very few people actually have it, meaning theists shouldn't defend their belief in God on this basis. And in any case, unless theists can provide skeptics for a reason to think that this divine recognition capacity exists and is veridical, there's no way they can reasonably expect to convince skeptics and certainly no way to claim that skepticism about God is equivalent to skepticism about the external world - all they can do is reassure themselves.
Regarding the analogy to moral knowledge, it's tough to deny that we have some capacity to recognize right and wrong, but it seems like claims to this capacity can be made in either direction. Take, for example, the substack sensation debates on shrimp welfare. The anti-shrimp side will claim that we can just recognize that no amount of shrimp pain can ever be worth a human life, and the the pro-shrimps will counter that we can just recognize that pain is bad, so the rest is all rationalization. It would be good for the two sides to have some way to make progress, rather than just shout back and forth about how the other's recognitional capacities are malfunctioning.
But maybe this is less desirable, or at any rate possible, with something like religion and belief in God. It's not for nothing that the Catholic Church denies that doctrines like the Trinity and the Incarnation can be proven by reason, and it's up to God to give or withhold the gift of faith.
You can also look at Wittgenstein's "hinge beliefs" as an attempt to describe this gap without taking a stand for either side. It feels like he gets adopted by the religious fictionalists more often, but there's nothing about his analysis that precludes belief in God or even in a particular religion. Everybody knows about Anscombe and Geach, but somebody like Herbert McCabe, OP could state three of the Five Ways as arguments about what's demanded (or made impossible) by our use of language, or use demythologizing rhetoric to affirm the Resurrection, rather than to reformulate or reject it.
Finally, the point about seeing the thoughts and emotions of others through their faces and bodies put me in mind of Edith Stein, whose earliest work was about this capacity, and who went on to write multiple major works discussing the relationship between phenomenology and Catholic philosophy (especially Thomism), but as far as I know never appealed to our capacity for recognition, as it is here (or in Wittgenstein or Plantinga). Perhaps she would have, if she had not been murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.