Anselm's idea and the alignment argument

Let's begin with the ‘alignment argument’, derived from reflection on Anselm's ontological argument. We begin by contemplating the idea of a reality greater than which none can be conceived – a metaphysical and axiological ultimate in relation to which we can realize our own highest good. Schellenberg's religious sceptic entertains this idea with wonder and awe. ‘Look at this amazing idea’, she says, ‘just look at it’.

Given reflections such as these, it is easy to see why one might want it to be the case that if the Ultimate exists, one is properly aligned with it – that if there is such a thing, one's dispositions and behaviour are ‘in accord with or befitting’ it. One should want this for its own sake, and not merely because of some other benefit, although there are other benefits.

What sorts of dispositions and behaviours are appropriate to the Ultimate? Schellenberg approaches this question by thinking in terms of purposes that would be possessed by ‘a human being with twenty-first-century capacities but also flawless practical rationality’.Footnote ⁸ Confronted with something ‘ultimately real and valuable’, such a person would experience ‘wonder and awe’, would seek a life filled with ‘good actions’, would cultivate both moral and intellectual virtues, and would be filled with love and reverence for the good.

Our idealized twenty-first-century sceptic cannot claim that it is likely that the Ultimate is real. But she does think that it is of the utmost importance that she be aligned with the Ultimate if it is. She also sees that the best way to make sure of this is to build her life around faith in its reality. Practical rationality therefore requires her to embrace and to practice sceptical religion.

What are we to make of this argument? I have several concerns. The first has to do with the ‘wonder’ and ‘awe’ with which the religious sceptic entertains the idea of the Ultimate. It is important to distinguish an idea of something that would be wonderful if it existed, and a wonderful idea of that same thing. Awe would be appropriately directed toward the Ultimate – if it existed and were present to us. But I do not think it is appropriately directed toward our sketchy idea of an Ultimate that may or may not exist. If I were to experience the presence of something metaphysically and axiologically ultimate, I would (quite appropriately) be filled with wonder and awe and reverence. If, in addition, I experienced a salvific relation to the Ultimate, something akin to love and gratitude would not be far behind. But it does not seem to me that merely contemplating the idea of the Ultimate warrants such a response.

All the same, should I not want it to be the case that if there is an Ultimate – one which is an appropriate object for wonder and awe – I am properly ‘aligned’ with it? And must I not do all I can to make sure that this is the case? Well, yes, if it's just a matter of cultivating moral and intellectual virtues, of loving the good, and even of being prepared to experience wonder and awe if the Ultimate (and not merely some idea of it) should make its appearance. Those are things we should do whether or not the Ultimate exists. But is it reasonable to go further and insist on a faith commitment? I think not.

To demand that we assent to the proposition that the Ultimate exists is to make additional assumptions about its nature for which we have been given no warrant. Why think it is more in accord with whatever metaphysical and axiological Ultimate there may be to cultivate the faith that it exists than to stay on the fence? Here is another possibility to think about. Perhaps waiting with open minds and hearts contributes more to proper alignment with the Ultimate than rushing into a premature faith commitment. Perhaps just such waiting is the way in which creatures at our level of development are best aligned with the Ultimate. Who is to say that this is not so?

Let me put the same point in a slightly different way. This is supposed to be ultimism without details. So understood, it is equivalent to a vast disjunction of possibilities. Even after traditional theism is rejected, the variety of options with which we are familiar is enormous; and the number of possibilities that we have not yet thought of is still greater. Given some of these possibilities, Schellenbergian faith may be just what is required; but given others, it may not be. So which version of ultimism is more likely to be correct? We are forbidden to say. The problem is that what's required for proper ‘alignment’ depends on the details. And details are just what we (in our present immaturity and ignorance) do not possess. Schellenberg's preferred option may be as good as faithless scepticism. Then again, it may not be.

The sceptical dominance argument

I turn next to the sceptical dominance argument inspired by Pascal's Wager. Either the Ultimate exists, or it doesn't. Either way, rational prudence requires that we wager on the Ultimate, building a sceptical religious practice on faith that it is real.

Suppose, first, that it is real. Then by making the faith commitment, we align ourselves with the deepest and most valuable thing in reality, something which Schellenberg believes he has already shown to be intrinsically valuable. But there is more. Such commitment and alignment are also ‘prudentially attractive’. They add to the ‘richness of life’ and ‘ready’ us for ‘ever deeper discoveries in connection with the Ultimate’.Footnote ⁹ They allow us to respond positively to ‘experiences of the numinous or the sublime’, as well as to what Peter Berger has called ‘signals of transcendences’ – to ‘our occasional sense of “trust in the order of reality” (our sense that “everything is all right”), or the experience of “joyful play”, in which ordinary time seems suspended, or of invincible hope, or of “monstrous evil”, or even of humour, which intimates redemption from the “imprisonment of the human spirit in the world” ’.Footnote ¹⁰ Experiences such as these, Schellenberg says, ‘invite us to turn our nothingness in the direction of infinity’. When we respond to this invitation by lending our ‘imagination and will to the possibility of a religious dimension’, the value of our lives is increased.Footnote ¹¹

Suppose, on the other hand, that the Ultimate is not real. Even then, we are better off making the faith commitment. We won't be aligned with the Ultimate (because it doesn't exist), but we can still aim at the ‘unlimited’, and seek to ‘transcend’ our limited condition. Schellenberg thinks this is good for us. By following up on signs of the Ultimate, and committing ourselves to sceptical religion, our lives acquire an ‘infinite’ quality and we can achieve a ‘fulfilment’ that would otherwise be impossible for us.

Either way, then, Schellenberg is quite certain that we are better off with faith in the Ultimate than without it.

Here, I think, Schellenberg goes too far. A sceptic who refuses to make the wager of faith needn't be shallow or materialistic. Nor need she be unwilling ‘to seriously explore those possibilities of transcendence’. She may well have quite an open mind. What she will not do is to give practical ‘assent’ to what reason forbids her to believe. Why think that such a person's life must be less full or rich or deep than that of the religious sceptic? As far as I can see, human solidarity and moral seriousness in the face of the unknown are perfectly possible without the aid of a faith commitment to the Ultimate.

By way of illustration, consider the central character in Camus's La Peste. As Camus imagines him, Dr Rieux fights what he sees as a losing battle against everything that threatens (and ultimately overwhelms) human beings. His is a large-hearted humanism that has no use for any sort of faith. Imagining an Ultimate that will finally ‘save’ us will not help Rieux with the task at hand, which is to save as many lives as possible from the ravages of plague. I see no reason to think that he is shallow or imprudent or irrational.

It is no doubt true that for persons of a certain temperament the decision matrix may come out the way Schellenberg suggests that it does. If you are deeply distressed by human finitude or demoralized by the thought that whatever may be ultimately real is not ‘on the side of the good’, or if you are particularly susceptible to the elusive ‘signals of transcendence’ that some of us experience, and if you are not too risk-averse, then for you the wiser course may be to take up Schellenberg's wager. That, I say, may be what's best for you. But I see no reason to generalize – no reason to think that ‘[a]ny right-thinking, prudent human doubter’ would have to join you.

Schellenberg does at one point consider something like this objection. Like Pascal, Schellenberg has an imaginary interlocutor. ‘Let the Ultimate reveal itself to me if it wants my commitment!’, says the interlocutor.

Schellenberg replies that ‘by taking on a religious commitment in my sense you don't lose any of this; you only add to it’. But is this really so clear? Some may find their lives enriched by sceptical religious pursuits; they may find that it enlarges their lives and expands their horizons to spend time ‘imagining’ the Ultimate, acting ‘as if’ it is really there, and betting their lives on that possibility. But others may find it distracting and unnecessary to be constantly ‘assenting’ to propositions that are unworthy of belief. Life, they may say, is too short to waste in the pursuit of possibilities that may well be illusory – especially when there is so little chance of finding out that one has got hold of the truth, and when there is so much morally significant work to be done right now.

The proper conclusion, I am suggesting, is that whether a life is better lived with – or without – sceptical faith depends on the disposition and temper and circumstances of the individual. But I have another concern as well. If Schellenberg's Ultimate does not exist, then building one's life around faith that it does is betting one's life on an illusion. And that, I think, should trouble those who are tempted by the ultimistic wager.

To see the importance of this point, note that some of us would not get into Robert Nozick's ‘experience machine’, no matter what was promised and no matter how certain we were that the machine would deliver on that promise.Footnote ¹⁴Reality, we think, matters. But if reality matters enough to us, we may want to make sure that we are not betting our lives on an illusion. Indeed, we may very much want it to be the case that if the Ultimate is not real we do not bet our lives on it. Far better to live in that part of the world we know to be real, embracing our fellows with compassion, and doing what we can for one another before the darkness falls.

The Kantian contribution

I have suggested more than once that wholehearted moral commitment does not require the sustenance of faith. At this point Schellenberg's chapter on Kant becomes especially relevant. Its main thesis is that if we replace God with the Ultimate and belief with faith, a very strong ‘moral commitment argument’ for sceptical religion emerges. Schellenberg argues that ultimism is both presupposed by wholehearted moral commitment to the human good and the best way to motivate it. I want to take a close look at the first part of the argument – the part that concerns the presuppositions of such commitment. Here is Schellenberg's summary.

Let's begin by considering the first premise: we ought all to be wholeheartedly committed to the human good. By ‘the human good’, Schellenberg says that he means ‘perfect justice and fulfilment of potential for all’.Footnote ¹⁶ Wholehearted commitment to bringing that about might seem a lot to ask. Isn't it enough to leave the world ‘a little better than we found it’? Schellenberg resists this suggestion, insisting that empathy and respect have no boundaries, and that once we see how good any movement in the direction of the human good would be, we will see that each of us has an obligation to do her bit to make it a reality.

Is this a plausible moral requirement? When I consider this question, I find myself thinking of Billy Kwan – a haunting character in The Year of Living Dangerously.Footnote ¹⁷ As he walks with an Australian reporter through a terrible Jakarta slum, Billy asks, ‘What shall we do?’ ‘A mere five dollars’, he continues, ‘would be a fortune to one of these people’. His companion replies, ‘Wouldn't do any good, just be a drop in the ocean’. Billy disagrees. ‘What's your solution?’, the reporter asks, and Billy replies: ‘Well, I support the view that you just don't think about the major issues. You do whatever you can about the misery that's in front of you. Add your light to the sum of light’.

Both participants in this conversation understand that it would be completely unrealistic to form the intention to eliminate all poverty, disease, and injustice. But as Billy Kwan so clearly sees, that is not an excuse for doing nothing. If we give with love what we can to whom we can, we shall have made a real and important difference – to them. We do not need – and are not rationally required to have – the intention of ‘contributing’ to the eventual elimination of poverty, disease, and injustice. A fortiori, we are not required to have the intention of helping, finally, to realize the human good for everyone.

But suppose, for the sake of argument, that we do have this obligation. What follows? This brings us to steps (2) and (3) of the argument. Schellenberg thinks that those who are wholeheartedly committed to the human good must have moral faith – that they must assent to the proposition that the human good will someday be realized. In defence of this further claim, he says it is ‘hard to imagine how one could actually display such a commitment to the human good without picturing the world as one in which it is realized’. ‘Clearly’, he continues, ‘one will give to this imagined state of affairs a positive evaluation’.Footnote ¹⁸

That is no doubt true – it would indeed be good if the human good were fully realized. But what does this have to do with the ‘mental assent’ required for faith? Schellenberg explains:

I am not persuaded. I don't see why we need faith to support us, but even if we did I do not see why it would require this ambitious content. That is, I do not see why, in order to pursue the human good, we need to assent to the proposition that it will someday be fully realized. At most it follows that we need to assent to the proposition that our actions can make a difference – or, to put it more precisely, that they will make it a bit more likely that this goal will be achieved.

But suppose I am mistaken, and we are rationally required to conjure up faith that the universal good will be (or can be?) realized. This brings us to steps (4) and (5) of the argument. Schellenberg thinks that we are also ‘rationally required’ to have faith that there is a transcendent reality that is ‘on the side of the good’ and is ‘capable of ensuring its realization’.Footnote ²⁰ Why bring in a transcendent reality? Because, I take it, we know only too well that human efforts alone can never be sufficient to guarantee that the human good will be realized for all. We also know that the universe is indifferent to our strivings. So unless ‘there is a transcendent reality on the side of the good capable of ensuring its realization’, we must conclude that ‘the tragedy of such things as undeveloped potential and lives cut short is irremediable’.Footnote ²¹ Moral faith therefore leads to the faith that there is such a transcendent reality.

At this point, it's not entirely clear to me what we are being asked to imagine. Is eventual success guaranteed, not on earth but in some other realm? Then how are our efforts supposed to make a difference to whether it is realized in that other realm? Will a child we tried and failed to save from the ravages of poverty have a better chance in another life? Will our efforts have made a difference to that child's fate in the afterlife? We are understandably short of specifics here – this is faith ‘without details’, after all. Even so, the propositional content of that faith will have to be calibrated precisely enough to fill the gap between the moral ideal and what we can reasonably hope to achieve on our own. If we think that the transcendent reality in which we place our faith and trust does everything without our help, then there will be no reason for us to do anything. So how, exactly, is this supposed to work? Does the transcendent reality work through our efforts? Does it perhaps take up the slack when our efforts fall short? Of course, Schellenberg's twenty-first-century sceptic is not well positioned to answer these questions. But if she is to find sustenance in faith, she will have to imagine the transcendent in more detail than we have so far been given.

Let's move on to the steps (6) and (7) of the argument – the steps that commit the religious sceptic to faith in the Ultimate. We must, Schellenberg says, have faith that this transcendent reality is ‘fully ultimate and salvific’. That too, we are told, is ‘rationally required’.Footnote ²² Why should we accept this claim? Because, Schellenberg says, a transcendent reality that is ‘fully and ultimately salvific’ would be ‘more deeply and more richly responsive to our moral striving’. Without this additional content, we'd be left wondering how transcendent reality is able to do the job, how it is related to ‘other realities’, and this would be ‘distracting’. However, if one says that ‘the reality in question is not just transcendent but also ultimate’, this ‘fills in all the blanks and gives one an object of contemplation truly worthy of such attention’.Footnote ²³

Fills in all the blanks? I am not sure what Schellenberg can mean by this. Limiting ourselves to saying that there is some ultimate reality or other that is fully ‘salvific’ leaves us, as he well knows, with a host of questions that are unlikely to be answered for a very long time (if ever). So how should we imagine ‘salvation history’, and what part does the Ultimate play in it? How is the Ultimate related to the natural world and its laws? And why hasn't the Ultimate already brought about justice and fulfilment for all?

At this point, something like the problem of evil – this time a problem for Schellenberg's ultimism – bursts into view. Why is the Ultimate, which is wholly ‘on the side’ of the good and guarantees eventual ‘perfect justice and fulfilment for all’, taking so long to bring this about? Why, for that matter, is the Ultimate hidden from so many of us? These are versions of the very objections that, according to Schellenberg, warrant the conclusion that the God of classical theism does not exist.Footnote ²⁴ Why are they not equally serious problems for ultimism?

Schellenberg briefly considers this worry, acknowledging that ‘horrible events … might lead one to question whether there is an ultimate religious reality of any kind’. Nevertheless, he insists that we can ‘do justice to the moral impulses that led us to call it into question in the first place’ only by assenting to the claim that facts about value are ‘deep in the nature of things’, and he thinks we can best do this by ‘picturing the world according to the ultimistic claim and living by that picture’. Indeed, he says, moral considerations similar to ‘those that may have led us to abandon religious faith (misunderstood as entailing theistic belief)’ may be ‘instrumental to our regaining it (properly understood)’.Footnote ²⁵

It seems to me that Schellenberg has misread the dialectical situation. His argument from horrors was supposed to show that classical theism is false. That's why non-believing faith in the God of St Anselm is not one of the options available to his twenty-first-century sceptic. But if the present objection is correct, then a potentially strong argument from horrors can be mounted against ultimism. Given the presence of so many of them in our world, why should we not conclude that the metaphysical ultimate (if there is one) is not entirely ‘on the side of the good’? At this point in the dialectic, we are considering an argument for the falsity of ultimism. In response to such an argument, it is inapt to appeal to the benefits of faith, since faith becomes an option only after it has been established that we are not rationally required to believe that ultimism is false. So I think Schellenberg needs to take the bull by the horns and say why the argument from horrors fails to show that ultimism is false even though it does succeed in showing that theism is false.

One final point calls for attention. It is evident that the neo-Kantian argument assumes that individuals live on after the death of their brains and bodies. Without this assumption, it would be only too evident that the human good will not be realized for everyone. Schellenberg is quite explicit about this point.

I don't know what to make of the qualification, ‘for at least some of us’. Does ‘perfect justice’ require that moral monsters like Hitler and Stalin be cut off? Do the perfect justice and the perfect fulfilment requirements come apart in such cases? However that may be, it is clear that faith in ultimism is supposed to include the faith that many persons live on after their deaths.

There is, Schellenberg says at one point, a ‘morally powerful argument for faith involving the idea of life after death’.Footnote ²⁷ How so? Well, it ought to be true that ‘conscious experience persists beyond the grave’, and this is by itself a strong reason to take on board the faith that we do survive death.Footnote ²⁸ Such faith, Schellenberg says, is the best and deepest way of ‘paying tribute’ to those we have loved and lost. And not only to those we have loved and lost, but to all who were loved or who ‘deserved to be loved’. In all such cases, ‘the responsive gesture of faith is warranted’.Footnote ²⁹

I confess that I do not see how it would show a lesser degree of love or respect for the deceased to regard their deaths as final and tragic. But what I find most troubling here lies in a different direction. As far as I can see, it is being assumed without argument that life after death is a realistic possibility. This is worrisome. Many philosophers believe that there is weighty evidence for thinking that brain death is followed by a permanent experiential blank, and little to none for thinking that conscious life continues. Brain damage can change a person's mind and personality in profound ways. New capacities (for example, an appreciation for gourmet food or classical music) may be acquired; more often, old capacities are lost. Brain trauma can render a person wholly unconscious. Facts like these are numerous and well known. Taken together, they strongly suggest that one's conscious life depends on the functioning of one's brain. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it is natural to conclude that the destruction of the brain brings with it the permanent cessation of consciousness. A lot more would need to be said to make the argument stick, but if it could then reason would require disbelief, and (on the ground marked out by Schellenberg) faith in life after death would be ruled out from the start. At the very least, then, it must be said that there is a significant gap in the argument for sceptical religion. There is hard work to do before we have a right even to consider the appropriateness of a faith that assents to the proposition that conscious life continues after death. And, by the same token, there is a lot of hard work to do before we can acknowledge the appropriateness of a faith that assents to any proposition (such as ultimism) that entails life after death.

Be that as it may, isn't ultimistic faith the best way to protect moral motivation? Schellenberg thinks it is. We are threatened, among other things, by ‘general despair about the human good ever being achieved’, and sceptical religion provides the best way of overcoming despair and cultivating wholehearted commitment to the human good.Footnote ³⁰

Again, I am not persuaded. Suppose, if only for the sake of argument, that death is the end. Suppose further that there is no transcendent reality on the side of the good, and that Bertrand Russell's oft-quoted words are true – that ‘all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system’.Footnote ³¹ That is a sad and sobering thought. But it can be integrated into wholehearted moral commitment in a significant and constructive way. It is worth remembering that in the same article Russell wrote: ‘United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love’.Footnote ³² I do not think this way of connecting cosmic pessimism with moral commitment is at all far-fetched. If we see things aright, awareness of our ‘common doom’ can give us a reason to be mutually supportive. We are, after all, in this thing together. And while life in this universe lasts, there are goods to be achieved with and for one another. Believing that there is no guarantee of success can – for at least some of us – be a reason to try all the harder and to celebrate our victories, however small and temporary they may be.

This completes what I have to say about three of Schellenberg's most interesting arguments for the thesis that ultimistic faith is rationally required. I have suggested that they provide little support for such an ambitious claim. However, I want to make it clear that I have not denied either that ultimistic faith is attractive or that it is rationally permissible. Indeed, I have little doubt that Schellenberg is onto something big and important here – exploring virgin territory in a comprehensive and rigorous way. So although I have found fault with several of his arguments, I am grateful for the possibilities they have helped me to see and for the deep questions they have led me to consider.Footnote ³³