The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

48 Philosophical Failure
of our contemporaries. A present-day advocate of the possibility of the
finitude of space could, for example, point to the fact that many scientists
think that it is a real possibility that space is finite (although unbounded),
a fact that could not have been appealed to in the eighteenth century.
And it is not parochial of us to be specially interested in the question of
which philosophical arguments are successes given what we know today,
or what is for all practical purposes the same thing, what we think we
know today. After all, we know lots of things of philosophical relevance
that were not known in the Age of Reason or the Middle Ages or in
classical antiquity. And we know that lots of things that people in those
times and cultures thought they knew are false—things whose falsity is
of great philosophical importance.
Here is another important question that confronts my criterion, a
question that confronts it in virtue of my limiting membership in the
audience of agnostics to our contemporaries. Might there not be an
argument that’s an absolutely perfect and compelling argument in the
eyes of God, so to speak, but that would not be a success by my criterion
because of some misconception universal in our time and culture?
(And, of course, the opposite possibility also exists: an argument might
convince everyone who shares the misconceptions of the present day,
but be an abject failure in the eyes of God.) These possibilities are real,
but I insist that the criterion is an interesting and useful one despite
their reality. It would be an interesting thing to establish that a certain
argument was a success in my sense, even if there were some deeper,
Platonic sense, in which it might be a failure.
Here is a third question. Might it not be that there was an argument
for p that was a success by my proposed criterion and another argument,
an argument for the denial of p, thatwasalso a success? And isn’t this
possibility an embarrassment for the criterion? Shouldn’t a criterion
of success in philosophical argument rule out a priori any possibility
of there being two arguments, both successes, whose conclusions are
logical contradictories? But does this possibility in fact exist? Only, I
think, if we suppose that one of the two arguments is unknown to
the debaters. There is no contradiction in supposing that there exist,
Platonically speaking, two arguments, N an argument for nominalism
and R an argument for realism, such that (i) if the nominalist knew of
N and the realist did not know of R, the nominalist, wielding N, would
be able to convert the agnostics to nominalism, despite the best efforts
of the realist to prevent their conversion, and (ii) if the realist knew of
R and the nominalist did not know of N, the realist, wielding R, would