Progressive Atheism: How Moral Evolution Changes the God Debate PDF
Preview Progressive Atheism: How Moral Evolution Changes the God Debate
Progressive Atheism ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY Explaining Evil, edited by W. Paul Franks Free Will and God’s Universal Causality, by W. Matthews Grant Spirituality without God, by Peter Heehs The Maturing of Monotheism, by Garth Hallett Progressive Atheism How Moral Evolution Changes the God Debate J. L. Schellenberg BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © J. L. Schellenberg, 2019 J. L. Schellenberg has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 185 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Maria Rajka Cover image © Jose A. Bernat Bacete/Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-9718-6 PB: 978-1-3500-9719-3 ePDF: 978-1-3500-9720-9 eBook: 978-1-3500-9721-6 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. For Regina Contents Preface viii 1 Getting Oriented 1 2 An (A)Theological Dead End 17 3 Naturalism’s Shortcut 35 4 Unexplored Territory: Moral Evolution 59 5 Updating God 77 6 A Relationally Responsive God 97 7 A Kinder God 109 8 A Nonviolent God 123 9 Challenging the New Theism 137 10 Atheism’s Brave New World 155 Notes 177 Glossary 183 Acknowledgments 185 Index 186 Preface People think of me as an atheist. I think of me as an atheist. That’s because I’ve defended the view that there is no personal God of the sort idealized in theistic religion. But I’m an atheist only in the relatively narrow sense just specified—the sort of atheist more commonly found in philosophy than elsewhere. In much of my work, I’ve been moving on from the personal God idea and exploring new religious domains, including new ways of being religious that are compatible with atheism. Indeed, this is the larger part of what I’ve done. Occasionally, however, I return to atheistic reasoning. I’m returning to it again in this book. I return, in part, because people won’t join me in thinking about other religious topics if they’re still preoccupied with theism. And in part it’s because exciting new results—like the approach to atheism we’ll be exploring—keep emerging in that neighborhood. * * * It was 2011, and a copy of Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined landed with a thud at my door. Reading it, I was struck by Pinker’s evidence that human empathy has grown over the years. What we see here, he suggests, is a form of moral progress opposed to violence. I remembered how I had appealed to divine empathy in my version of the philosophical Prefa ce ix problem of evil a few years before, and began wondering whether this sort of emphasis in the context of the God debate might get more of a grip on us today because of moral progress like that emphasized by Pinker. Was human moral progress making us think differently about the nature of God—in particular about how a truly good God would behave—and was this opening up new possibilities of atheistic argumentation? It occurred to me that the hiddenness argument for atheism I had developed and defended, which was receiving a surprising amount of attention in philosophy, also fit this pattern. The hiddenness argument suggests that a common way of being undecided about the God issue itself decides the issue. Many more of us would believe in God if there were a God, since God would be supremely loving and thus open to personal relationship with beings like us. And you can’t very well be open to such a relationship with someone while preventing them from believing in your existence. How inviting! The openness to relationship receiving emphasis here was something that in another time might have been shrugged off as entirely optional, especially for males and fathers. And, of course, in earlier times it would have been easier to think of God as both Male and Father. But it wasn’t being shrugged off now. Today the hiddenness problem was a hot topic. If there was a new pattern here, a new way of arguing atheistically, so I thought to myself, it might be a better, more powerful way of arguing than we’ve seen before. Perhaps it would generate new arguments, all following the same pattern. Being so different from popular atheistic approaches, which often focus on making God look bad, it might furthermore show how atheism could have a more positive and interesting role in our culture. The seed had been planted. At various times since 2011 I’ve felt it there, at the back of my mind. Now, in this book, I want to see what may grow from it. What grows probably won’t reach its full height
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