The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

Philosophical Failure 39
suggestion I borrow from Alvin Plantinga’s book God and Other Minds.
(I don’t mean to imply that Plantinga endorsed this suggestion.) The
argument is a success if it starts with premises almost no sane, rational
person would doubt, and proceeds by logical steps whose validity almost
no sane, rational person would dispute, to the conclusion that God
exists. Otherwise, it is a failure. (I say ‘‘almost no sane, rational person’’
because of cases like the following. St Thomas’s First Way begins with
the premise that some things change. And Zeno denies that anything
changes. I should not want to say that Thomas’s argument was defective,
not a success, simply because it assumed without argument that change
was a real feature of the world. And I should also not want to say that
Zeno was insane or irrational.)
Only one thing can be said against this standard of philosophical
success: if it were accepted, almost no argument for any substantive
philosophical thesis would count as a success. (I say ‘‘substantive philosophical
thesis’’ because I concede that there are, so to call them, minor
philosophical theses—such as the thesis that, whatever knowledge may
be, it is not simply justified true belief—for which there are arguments
that should convert any rational person. I call this thesis minor
not because I think that the problem of the analysis of knowledge
is unimportant, but precisely because the thesis does not constitute
an analysis of knowledge; its message is only that a certain proposed
analysis is a failure. Or suppose, as many have supposed, that Gödel’s
incompleteness results show, establish that the formalists were wrong
about the nature of mathematics. The thesis that formalism is false may
in one way be an important philosophical thesis, but only because a lot
of people had thought that formalism was true. It is not a substantive
philosophical thesis in the way formalism itself is. I am inclined to think
that most philosophical theses for which there is an argument that is
a success by the standard we are considering are of this general sort,
theses to the effect that a certain analysis does not work, or that some
plausible generalization has exceptions, or that some argument turns on
a logical fallacy.) If there were an argument, an argument for a substantive
philosophical thesis, that was a success by this standard, there
would be a substantive philosophical thesis such that every philosopher
who rejected it was either uninformed—unaware of the existence of a
certain argument—or irrational or mad. Are there any? Well, I used to
think that Church’s Thesis (a rather recondite thesis in the philosophy
of mathematics—it has to do with how to provide a certain important
intuitive concept with a mathematically precise definition) could be