Philosophy without God
How would philosophy be different if we didn't start from God?
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.— Genesis 1:1-3
The Hebrews began with the idea that G*d created heaven and earth. G*d spoke to them from a burning bush and turned them into pillars of salt when they didn’t listen.
God in modern Judaism is more distant and philosophical but would we have this modern, transcendent God if we hadn’t previously had this nearby God who put people in whales?
On a similar trajectory, Christians had a God who walked on water and fed the five thousand. But, by the time the Middle Ages arrived, theologians spoke of a transcendent God and they proved His existence with philosophy.
God is a being that cannot be conceived of as being greater.
It is possible to conceive of such a being.
It is greater to exist than not to exist.
Therefore, God must exist.— St. Anselm (1078)
I wonder whether we would have had a transcendent God if we hadn’t previously had an everyday God who lived among us. I wonder how much influence this transcendent God has had on the history of philosophy — even the philosophers who don’t believe in Him.
Descartes got off to a great start with cogito, ergo sum, but then he got in a bit of a muddle proving the next bit and had to invoke God to dismiss the mauvais génie. I expect Descartes would have shared a very different ontology if his world didn’t need a supremely perfect being to explain its existence.
Philosophers argued what this meant for the next few hundred years but what would they have argued about if they started with John Dalton and Epicurus instead of King Solomon?
And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven: this sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith.
Ecclesiastes 1:13
Descartes told another good story about how mind and body were made from distinct substances, but might he have found a different explanation if he hadn't needed to explain the part that goes to heaven to be reunited with God?
Would we still be arguing about the China Brain and The Hard Problem of Consciousness if Descartes had not proposed a mysterious, undetectable substance unrelated to neurons and synapses? Would we even be wondering what it is like to be a bat or what Mary learned in her room if philosophers had skipped straight to neuroscience? What if they had started with Ramón y Cajal rather than Descartes?
William Paley’s argument from design sounded perfectly reasonable when everyone assumed there was a Designer, but Paley’s explanation lost steam somewhat when Charles Darwin suggested we didn’t need a designer after all.
The old argument from design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.
– Charles Darwin (1887)
Would Paley have given us his argument from design if he was not already sure there was a Designer? And how much sooner would we have discovered the Origin of the Species if we hadn’t put so much faith in a Divine Watchmaker? Likewise, if modern philosophers did not already believe in a designer, would they still be trying to explain where macro-molecules came from?
Even philosophers who do not believe in the Christian God often wonder how so many physical constants seem to have been chosen just right to make our solar system and our carbon-based life forms possible. It may be true that if the Big Bang had banged with a slightly different-sized bang, the universe would not have happened. But would these philosophers have thought to suggest the constants were fine-tuned if they hadn’t been brought up to believe in a Fine-Tuner?
I’m approaching the end of a degree in philosophy and almost every chapter makes me wonder where the philosophers got their ideas from. Natural Rights, for example.
Our version of natural rights came to us via a Dominican priest who claimed natural law began with a divine spark from God. This spark gave us our set of inalienable rights. John Locke discovered one more right in the Holy Bible and called out ‘Life, Liberty and Property’ as particularly important. Thomas Jefferson mostly agreed but his Creator gave us The Pursuit of Happiness rather than The Pursuit of Property.
Would we have still come up with a Universal Declaration of Human Rights without all this divine endowment? Hume said we invented our rights over the centuries and millennia and adapted them to our circumstances as we went along. That’s more like it! Our genes gave us a law or two that we share with our cousins the gorillas. Perhaps those are the real natural laws — not the ones that Thomas Aquinas gave us.
I’ve been interested in the philosophy of mind for a dozen years — it’s one of the reasons why I started my degree in the first place — but now that I have heard what philosophers have to say, I think I would have been better off skipping straight to neuroscience.
Philosophers of mind seem to spend most of their time arguing either for or against dualism. Even Daniel Dennett wrote a whole book on it. Most of those philosophers are probably atheists or thereabouts, but many of them still argue that science will never explain how the brain works to our entire satisfaction. The others want to argue against them. There is a lot to be said about how the brain works but, in philosophy, you have to make it through the swamps of dualism first.
Personhood. Self. Natural Rights. Mind. Intelligent design. Fine-tuning. I don’t think philosophers would have come up with any of these if they hadn’t started from a ‘God Did It’ position. Maybe if we’d never invented the idea of God, philosophy wouldn’t be trying to accommodate Him all the time.
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I also think philosophy without thousands of years of theism would be quite different today. This opens up something that I’ve been meaning to bring up with you. Observe that philosophers have always explored the theoretical “rightness to wrongness” of behavior. Even today with various strong moral antirealists around however, apparently it hasn’t occurred to anyone credentialed to also explore the principles of good/bad existence itself. Why must everything in fields that are value based be entirely about moral judgement (perhaps except for aesthetics)? Can’t certain philosophers begin by theorizing the nature of good/bad in itself?
Perhaps a “theistic father” has contributed to this oversight? I hadn’t previously considered that possibility. Regardless whatever it is seems to have infected science as well. How might psychologists effectively study a creature which is driven by means of value, and yet not formally theorize what value happens to be constituted by? Apparently not well.
I mention this somewhat given your recent concerns about potentially being deprived of the legal ability to end your life should things get quite unfortunate. It would seem that academia has been too flawed to acknowledge that it’s not “life” that’s valuable, but exclusively “happiness”
There is a fundamental problem with explaining consciousness. We explain things by comparing them to more familiar things as metaphors but there's no familiar object or concept that comes anywhere near resembling consciousness.