Philosophy 224 Divine Persons: Broad on Personal Belief

Reading Quiz Why or why don’t you believe in God?

The Stake  The issue for Broad in this essay is whether or not it makes sense to believe in a personal God. First we need to be clear what it is we would be believing in. –Personal God: not “God who is a person” because for Christians, God is the trinity, and while the members of the trinity are persons, the trinity is not. –Personal God: is “either a person or a whole composed of nothing but interrelated persons” (188c2).

Persons Defining the compound term “personal God” is a good start, but we probably also need to be clear about the elements of the compound. For “persons,” Broad uses a strategy by now familiar to us: identification of necessary and sufficient conditions for personhood, and thus for the ascription of moral qualities. 1.Possession of mental states; 2.Unity at a time; 3.Unity across time; 4.Self-recognition.  An interesting wrinkle that he adds is the notion of degrees of personhood, defined relative to (2, 3, 4).

God Broad’s take on the concept of “God” is more novel. He recognizes that there is a great deal of obscurity in the notion and aims to clear it up by distinguishing 3 different sense of the term. 1.Popular: God as person (just more powerful, etc. than us). 2.Theological: a person or unity of persons, but definitely perfect, good, unique and singular, distinct from the universe. 3.Philosophical: broader concept than the other two, in some sense identified with the universe as a whole. a)Deism (that on which the existence of the universe depends). b)Pantheism (the necessary characteristics of everything). c)The reality behind the appearances.

Grounds For Belief With the groundwork laid, Broad turns to the issue at hand. He identifies three different ways in which the belief in God may be justified. 1.Direct Knowledge 2.Proof by rational argument 3.Testament of Authority  If it makes sense to believe in God, it has to be the case that one of these justifying strategies works.

Direct Knowledge The claim of direct knowledge of God can take two different forms. 1.Some have argued that God’s existence is self- evident. 2.Others have claimed direct, supersensible perception of God.  Both of these claims are highly dubious, but there is no way of directly refuting them either. Hobbes: “When a man tells me that God spoke to him in a dream, all that I can be sure of is that he dreamed that God spoke to him” (194-5).

Rational Arguments Two types in the literature: Deductive and Inductive Deductive: Ontological Argument (remember Anselm?) and Cosmological Argument. Ontological Argument clearly fallacious. Cosmological argument not clearly fallacious, but irrelevant. –Doesn’t prove the existence of a personal God, but at best the philosophical God.

Rational Arguments: Inductive All have the same form—given certain facts about the world, God probably exists. –If we start with facts about nature, we have a version of the design argument. –If we start with the fact that there are minds, we arrive at an argument from the mental. –If we start with religious experience, we get an argument from ubiquity. In the case of the first two types of inductive arguments, what they both demonstrate is that if you start with a narrow enough conception of the world, God seems required, but we should wonder about the starting point (197c1). In the case of the last argument, at best it establishes an impersonal, larger reality. In sum, none of the arguments are rationally compelling.

Testimony of Authority Clearly, it is often reasonable to accept the word of an authority on a matter. Broad specifies two conditions in terms of which this reasonableness is acknowledged. 1.Expert agreement, when the field of expertise is beyond my grasp. 2.Report of the experience of a trustworthy and competent observer.  As we’ve seen from the discussion of the other two grounds of belief, neither of these conditions is met in the case of God.

In conclusion… “Whether there be in fact a personal God or not, it seems to me that we have no good reason to believe in the existence of such a being” (198c2). This skepticism is primarily directed against the theological notion, but doesn’t have the same force against the popular notion. The difficulty is that the popular notion certainly doesn’t exclude polytheism, “…and the only reason against being a polytheist is that there is no reason for being one” (Ibid.).