An Economist’s Atheism
On Tyler Cowen’s “Why I Don’t Believe”
Tyler Cowen is an academic economist. He’s also inclined toward philosophical thinking. Frequently, when describing his intellectual and professional interests, he’ll cite both economics and philosophy as his chosen fields.
Last week, Cowen penned a piece explaining why he doesn’t believe in God — not a subject economists typically tackle head on.
To Cowen’s credit, he’s an even-handed thinker. Cowen concedes that his reservations about theism apply to atheism as well. So he’s undecided.
I’ll make a few observations about Cowen’s post.
First, he says he doesn’t think “God” or “theism” is well-defined.
But it’s unclear what that means. Systematic theologies define God. Likewise, philosophical theology delves into detailed expositions and analyses of the divine attributes.
He could be suggesting all of these attempted definitions and characterizations ultimately fail. It could also be that he hasn’t bothered to look at sources that would supply him with the definitions he’s after.
Take an example from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on omnipotence:
A being is omnipotent just provided that its overall power is not possibly exceeded by any being.
Is it that Cowen thinks this definition is not a good one or is it that he hasn’t considered the matter all that much?
Perhaps Cowen thinks some of the ways God has been construed make it hard to speak coherently about him. For example: it is perhaps natural to think that a claim such as “God exists outside of time” is really strange — unintelligible, even.
But before definitively concluding that God’s relation to time is not “well-defined,” an intellectual burden rests on the person wishing to make that claim to investigate the matter more closely.
Again, it’s possible Cowen has done so and his informed judgment is that all models of God’s relation to time are incoherent, but it’s also possible he’s not done so much as read a single entry on the topic in the first place.
For those interested, here are some relevant works to consult on the nature of God and his attributes:
- Tom Morris, Our Idea of God
- Katherin Rogers, Perfect Being Theology
- Brian Davies, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion
- Edwards Wierenga, The Nature of God: An Inquiry into Divine Attributes
Or from a less philosophical standpoint, the God of the Bible has a clearly discernible profile.
So his statement may mean he hasn’t read the relevant literature. He doesn’t know where to look.
But it’s possible that he doesn’t think the definitions are intelligible. Or maybe he thinks the definitions seem too imaginary. Cowen may share a materialist bias where anything that isn’t physical is nonsense.
If so, that issue isn’t confined to theology. In metaphysics, you have the issue of abstract objects (e.g., numbers, possible worlds). If Cowen is indeed operating with a materialist bias, it would be interesting to explore whether it’s being selectively applied or whether he’s applying it systematically. Full-scale metaphysical nominalism is not as common, or as defensible, as he might think.
Second, Cowen also comments on the heritable aspect of religious belief. The implication is that religious faith is due to social conditioning.
But isn’t that consistent with the truth of theism? Humans are social creatures. If God exists, why wouldn’t religion have a heritable aspect?
In the case of Christianity, which is grounded in historical redemption and revelation, the Christian faith is something you must learn about. It’s not just something you can intuit. It requires historical knowledge. And it’s natural for that to be handed down from one generation to the next.
That said, Cowen has a point. Clearly, there are people whose religious faith is just a historical accident. If they were born at a different time or place, they’d espouse a different religion or no religion.
Third, Cowen says “I am frustrated by the lack of Bayesianism in most of the religious belief I observe.” (Here’s a primer for those not familiar with Bayesianism.)
But what exactly is frustrating Cowen? He uses Bayesianism in economics, and he applies that yardstick to religion, even though he doesn’t see many others doing the same.
One danger with that is making your area of specialization the standard of comparison, even though it may be inappropriate to a different discipline.
There are, of course, Christians who do use Bayesianism. For example, Richard Swinburne and Lydia and Timothy McGrew. Personally, I’m dubious about its use within these sorts of discussions, but that’s a debate for another time.
Fourth, there’s more than one way to approach the issue of investigating religious faith.
Many intellectuals are massively ignorant of what Christianity genuinely is all about. In some cases, a starting point is to acquire rudimentary, firsthand knowledge of the Christian faith. Nowadays, there are intellectuals who haven’t even read the four Gospels. That’s a place to start.
One could follow up with a theological introduction to the Bible, like Tom Schreiner’s The King in His Beauty. A book like Schreiner’s is helpful in conveying the plot of the Bible.
That could be combined with a simple introduction to Christian theology, like J. I. Packer’s Concise Theology: A Guide to Historical Christian Beliefs.
There’s also the matter of the lived experience of believers. We shouldn’t underestimate the power of attending a good church, where the faithful gather to worship and pray.
One could also investigate ultimate reality more broadly rather than target Christianity or any other religion more specifically. Or one could investigate atheism as opposed to theism. This could lead to a kind of process of elimination whereby religious faith is the last option standing. Instead of proving Christian theism, we can disprove atheism.
The standard paradigm of naturalism (among modern Western thinkers) involves commitment to physicalism and causal closure (i.e., the world as a closed-system).
Many ontological naturalists thus adopt a physicalist attitude to mental, biological and other such “special” subject matters. They hold that there is nothing more to the mental, biological, and social realms than arrangements of physical entities.
(From: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/#MakCauDif)
In the final twentieth-century phase, the acceptance of the casual closure of the physical led to full-fledged physicalism. The causal closure thesis implied that, if mental and other special causes are to produce physical effects, they must themselves be physically constituted. It thus gave rise to the strong physicalist doctrine that anything that has physical effects must itself be physical.
(From: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/#RisPhy)
According to the standard paradigm, all mental activity occurs in the brain. That rules out mental action at a distance, and the ontological independence of the mind in relation to the body. On that definition, a way to disprove atheism is to disprove physicalism and causal closure.
There are various lines of evidence that undercut or falsify naturalism, for example:
Miracles
Robert Larmer, Dialogues on Miracle, Appendix
Robert Larmer, The Legitimacy of Miracle, Appendix
Craig Keener, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts
Terminal Lucidity
Apparitions of the Dead
P. Wiebe, God and Other Spirits: Intimations of Transcendence in Christian Experience
This is from a review of Wiebe on Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:
Those who believe in spirits will be pleased with this book. Those who are convinced of their non-existence will not be persuaded by this book. Most importantly, however, those who are open-minded about the possibility that there are such encounters will be given much to think about, and that alone makes it a worthwhile book, in my opinion.
In a post by the philosopher Michael Sudduth, there’s this excerpt:
Here’s a striking case: My two years in Windsor, Connecticut deepened my long-standing and recently re-wakened interest in survival. Within a couple of days of moving into the early Federal-style home built by Eliakim Mather Olcott in 1817, my wife and I (and dog) began to experience a combination of prototypical haunting and poltergeist phenomena. Although we critically investigated the various phenomena as they occurred, we were unable to trace the phenomena to natural causes. Given the fairly astonishing nature of some of the phenomena, my curiosity about our experiences peaked and I began research into the history of the home and the experiences of its former residents. This led to what has been a ten-year long investigation, including interviews with former residents, visitors to the home, and acquaintances of residents as far back as the 1930s. My inquiry turned up testimony from several prior occupants to experiencing phenomena identical, even in detail, to the phenomena my wife and I experienced. What I found equally fascinating, though, was the fact that occupants of the home prior to 1969, including long-term residents, claimed not to have experienced anything unusual. 1969 was the year resident Walter Callahan Sr. committed suicide in the home. In this way, the pattern of experiences surrounding the home fit a more widespread pattern in which ostensibly place-centered paranormal phenomena are associated with a suicide or other tragic event at the location.
Near-Death Experiences
Titus Rivas, Anny Dirven, and Rudolf Smit, The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences
Demonic Possession
M. Scott Peck, Glimpses of the Devil: A Psychiatrist’s Personal accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption
Precognition
Stephen Braude, ESP and Psychokinesis: A Philosophical Examination
Stephen Braude, The Gold Leaf Lady
The Hard Problem of Consciousness
No one should confuse the argumentative move just undertaken. The point isn’t that each of those phenomena are likelier to have happened than not, or that those accounts are likelier to be true than not. Rather, the point is that if we start by examining naturalism and its potential defeaters, there are several lines of evidence that could potentially sink it.
Fifth, and this is the final point.
Thinkers like Cowen who lack specific knowledge about the topic at hand tend to fall back on general rules of thumb. Cowen especially is up front about his utilization of rules for assessing intellectual matters and for navigating life more generally. Rules for thinking; rules for living.
But rules of thumb can lead one astray in certain circumstances.
When this happens, it can be useful to point people to specific evidence for Christianity, such as the historicity of the Gospels.
For instance:
Paul Barnett, Finding the Historical Jesus
Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses
Craig A. Evans, Jesus and His World: The Archeological Evidence
Craig Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels
Ultimately, if one of Cowen’s economics students were to make an economic claim without having looked into the matter all that much, Cowen would demand more of him or her. It’s possible Cowen’s done his homework; it’s also possible this is one topic — one of the few! — Cowen’s not bothered to really get into.
Berny Belvedere contributed to this story.
