Since its publication in 1991, William Alston's seminal book Perceiving God has garnered a great deal of critical attention.Footnote 1 My purpose in this short article is to continue this fine tradition. I highlight a tension between Alston's core thesis and a currently popular method for disarming a certain form of the argument from evil, a method which involves adopting a view known as sceptical theism.
Perceiving God
Let's say that a subject S has a mystical perception (MP) just in case S has an experience in which God (putatively)Footnote 2 appears to S as ϕ. For example, S could have an experience in which God is perceived as being ϕ (i.e. good, loving, nurturing, etc.), or S could have an experience in which God is perceived as doing ϕ (i.e. forgiving, strengthening, commanding something, etc.). My focus in this article will be on the latter sort of perceptions, although Alston himself discusses both.Footnote 3 Suppose that, on the basis of such a perception, S forms the belief that God is (doing)Footnote 4 ϕ. Alston's core thesis in Perceiving God is that beliefs about God formed in this way are prima facie justified.
Why prima facie? Well, crucial for Alston is that beliefs formed on the basis of MP are embedded within what he calls a ‘doxastic practice’ – a socially entrenched habit of forming beliefs with certain contents when in certain circumstances. The doxastic practice within which individual beliefs are embedded provides a system whereby the prima facie justification accruing to these individual beliefs can be overridden.Footnote 5
In order to illustrate this, let's consider a different and more widespread doxastic practice, that of forming beliefs on the basis of sense perception (SP). Suppose I seem to see a pink elephant floating in the sky. The prima facie justification possessed by my belief that such a thing is indeed occurring gets overriden by other more entrenched beliefs acquired from within the SP doxastic practice – for example, the beliefs that elephants are not pink, that elephants cannot float, and that the consumption of LSD is liable to produce non-veridical tokens of these types of experiences.Footnote 6
Sceptical theism
Sceptical theism embodies a strategy for dealing with the following kind of argument, where an instance of evil is ‘pointless’ just in case it is an instance of evil ‘which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse’:Footnote 7
(1) There seem to be instances of pointless evil.
(2) Therefore, there (probably) are instances of pointless evil.
(3) Pointless evils would not exist if God exists.
(4) Therefore, God (probably) doesn't exist.
Sceptical theists, in one way or another, claim that we are not entitled to move from (1) to (2). Abstracting away from the intricacies of particular arguments, one prominent line of thought is as follows. We humans, unlike God, are not omniscient. Given this, why should we expect to be aware of very much of what God knows about goods, evils, and the connections between them? Why, in other words, should we think that the goods, evils, and the connections between them that we're aware of are representative of all the goods, evils, and connections between them that there are? As Alvin Plantinga notes, ‘On the theistic conception, our cognitive abilities, as opposed to God's, are a bit slim for that.’Footnote 8
One of the attractive aspects of this kind of response is that it does not involve going beyond what is already licensed by one's religious commitments. Stephen Wykstra thus claims that a degree of scepticism sufficient to undermine the inference from (1) to (2) ‘was implicit in theism (taken with a little realism about our cognitive powers) all along’.Footnote 9 Scripture seems to corroborate this. We have, for example, God asking of Job the following question, which presumably is to be answered in the negative: ‘Do you know the ordinances of the heavens?’ (Job 38: 33). Likewise, Isaiah 55: 9: ‘For [as] the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts’, Corinthians 1: 20–21: ‘Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?’ and Romans 11: 33–34: ‘Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord?’. The application of such passages to the argument from pointless evil seems to be this: for any given instance of apparently pointless evil, God may well have reasons for allowing it, reasons which from our finite perspective we cannot hope to comprehend. Any instance of evil that seems pointless from our perspective might well, for all we can tell, have a point.
The tension
So theists might well seem entitled to a degree of scepticism sufficient to undermine the above argument from pointless evil. But if this is the case, then it seems to create problems for Alston's view that the doxastic practice within which MP is embedded is equipped to provide the kind of overriders that Alston expects of it.
Recall Alston's contention that beliefs about God formed on the basis of MP are prima facie justified, and that this prima facie justification can be overridden by other more firmly entrenched beliefs within the MP doxastic practice. Here are some of the criteria set out by Alston: ‘conformity with the tradition, concordance with what God could be expected to be, do, or say, and fruits in the way of spiritual development’.Footnote 10 Thus (to borrow an example from Alston), suppose Jim Jones reports that God told him that it is His will that all the members of Jones's sect commit suicide. Alston would hold that any prima facie justification enjoyed by Jones's belief that God is commanding such a thing is overridden by its conflict with the above criteria.Footnote 11
But we also saw above that a degree of scepticism concerning what God could be expected to do seems very much licensed by the religious tradition within which Alston is operating. The implication of this for the argument from pointless evil was that we have no grounds for thinking that apparently pointless evils do not have some point of which we are unaware, and the implication of it here seems to be that we have no grounds for thinking that God would not appear to us in any number of surprising ways, for example in telling us to commit suicide just as our church leader Jim Jones has told us He has willed us to do. And just as Scripture was seen above to lend support to sceptical theism, it lends support to the view that God often does appear in such ways: the binding of Isaac, for instance, is supposed to be an example of a veridical perception of God in which God acts in a somewhat unexpected way. Kant thus claimed that:
Abraham should have replied to this supposedly divine voice: ‘That I ought not to kill my good son is quite certain. But that you, this apparition, are God – of that I am not certain, and never can be, not even if this voice rings down to me from (visible) heaven.’Footnote 12
But the relevant point here is that the sceptical theist seems to have no grounds for requiring Abraham to respond in this way.
Alston claims that MP's overrider system ‘will eliminate all reports that represent God in ways that are incompatible with the main lines of tradition’.Footnote 13 However, if those ‘main lines of tradition’ themselves enjoin a degree of scepticism sufficient to undermine the move from (1) to (2), then it is hard to see how they can be appealed to in an overrider system: the sceptical theist seems to have deprived herself of any grounds she may have had for regarding beliefs formed on the basis of recalcitrant ‘perceptions’ as overridden. And this would be disastrous for Alston, since he holds that one can only take beliefs formed on the basis of MP to be prima facie justified in the first place inasmuch as they are embedded within a doxastic practice which is rationally engaged in, and a necessary condition for this is a workable overrider system. Take away the overrider system, and you take away even prima facie justification.
So the upshot seems to be this: if sceptical theism renders problematic the move from (1) to (2), then it also seems to render problematic the move from
(5) God appears to S as ϕ.
to
(6) S's belief that God is ϕ is prima facie justified.
Sceptical theism seems, in other words, to be in tension with Alston's core thesis in Perceiving God.
Concluding remarks
I have been concerned to highlight the tension between sceptical theism and Alston's core thesis; I have not been concerned to argue against one on the basis of the other, nor do I want to suggest that the tension is irresolvable. Furthermore, I do not want to claim that the general lines of thought I have suggested are wholly original: C. B. Martin, for example, argued as early as 1959 that MP lacks an effective overrider system,Footnote 14 and it is a familiar criticism of sceptical theism that it leads to a greater degree of scepticism regarding what God could be expected to do than will be acceptable to any theist. What I hope to have done here is to have made more explicit a connection between two important areas in the philosophy of religion. Furthermore, the fact that Alston himself is often cited as a sceptical theist,Footnote 15 and the fact that William Rowe, the original target of sceptical theists, himself attacks a thesis similar to Alston's on grounds that we might expect the sceptical theist to advance,Footnote 16 indicates that this connection may have been missed.Footnote 17
