'To See God's Sweet Love in Burning Coals'

'…. it is evident that having no proofs from any of the three sources of conviction: the mind  believe the existence of a God, it is also evident that as belief is a passion of the mind, no degree of criminality can be attached to disbelief, they only are reprehensible who willingly neglect to remove the false medium thro' which their mind views the subject. It is almost unnecessary to observe, that the general knowledge of the deficiency of such proof, cannot be prejudicial to society: Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind.- Every reflecting mind must allow that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity. Q.E.D.'.

So wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley, (1792 – 1822), in 'The Necessity of Atheism', the publication of which led to his expulsion from University College, Oxford. The three sources of conviction he refers to are the evidence of one's own senses, the operation of one's reasoning faculty upon the basis of such evidence, and one's experience of the testimony of others. As for that third source of conviction, of course no testimony of others ought to be entertained if it is contrary to the second source of conviction, that of one's reason, for one's reason establishes itself upon the first source of conviction, the evidence of one's own senses. 

Shelley, then, was an atheist necessarily, because of the nature of belief; that is, he could not choose what he believed; and, as he wrote in his 'Declaration of Rights': 'Belief is involuntary; nothing involuntary is meritorious or reprehensible. A man ought not to be considered worse or better for his belief'. This point is astutely argued for by Shelley, and I think it is correct; there may even be an absurdity to the notion of doxastic voluntarism, as it is known; i.e., choosing one's beliefs. Do you believe, for instance, that there is such a thing as extra-terrestrial life, that elsewhere in this vast universe there is intelligent, non-human, life? Concerning this matter, Arthur C. Clarke, (1917 – 2008), said that: 'Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying'. Or, as Sir Richard Blackmore, (1654 – 1729), expresses the point, very splendidly:

We may pronounce each orb sustains a race
Of living things, adapted to the place.
Were all the stars, whose beauteous realms of light,
At distance only hung to shine by night,
And with their twinkling beams to please our sight?
How many roll in ether, which the eye
Could ne‘er, till aided by the glass, descry;
And which no commerce with the Earth maintain!
Are all those glorious empires made in vain?

Perhaps that last question disturbs me, and then, terrified at the thought that we are alone in the universe, I choose to believe that there is indeed life on other planets. Until the mood passes, that is, and then, terrified at the thought that we are not alone in the universe, I choose to believe that there is indeed no life on other planets. But given the passive, involuntary, nature of belief, it is assuredly impossible that I could accomplish such a thing. 'To believe is nothing but to think with assent', said St. Augustine, (354 – 430). But, were beliefs voluntary, I could give my assent to the truth, or to the falsity, of a proposition, irrespective of whether or not I thought such a proposition to be, in fact, true, or false. And then, as Bernard Williams, (1929 – 2003), explains:

'With regard to no belief could I know - or, if all this is to be done in full consciousness, even suspect - that I had acquired it at will. But if I can acquire beliefs at will, I must know that I am able to do this; and could I know that I was capable of this feat, if with regard to every feat of this kind which I had performed I necessarily had to believe that it had not taken place?'

And yet so it is, according to certain dogmas of religion, that God rewards belief and punishes unbelief; in spite of the fact that 'nothing involuntary is meritorious or reprehensible,' as Shelley stated; belief is involuntary, and therefore blameless. O! Wherefore art thou justice? In this context that is more of a question of theodicy; I am concerned here, however, with the question of epistemic responsibility, if there can be such a thing, for if there is then what we believe becomes an ethical matter. That is, we ought to believe such and such, given the evidence; or we ought not to believe such and such, given the lack of evidence. And it is certainly to be regretted that Shelley did not expand on his tract, so that we may be apprised of his opinion concerning certain passages of St. Paul, (c. 5 – c. 67); often quoted passages, for those who wish to support the rather fanciful view that the atheist (Shelley, for instance), knows that God exists, and that the atheist also knows that the God which he knows to exist is also the God of the Bible. St.Paul wrote:

'For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, the just shall live by faith. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God has showed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse'.

('Romans', 1:16 – 23).

According to Christian apologist, William Lane Craig, (1949 - ): 'Here Paul says that on the basis of nature alone, all persons everywhere at any time in history can know that there is an eternal Creator who is a powerful deity that has made the world'. And Craig goes further: 'The Bible says all men are without excuse. Even those who are given no good reason to believe and many persuasive reasons to disbelieve have no excuse, because the ultimate reason they do not believe is that they have deliberately rejected God's Holy Spirit'. Craig is therefore a doxastic voluntarist, whether he knows that he is or not, and I am not aware of any arguments he proffers in support of that particular theory, (if anyone reading this knows differently, please direct me to the relevant passages).

Another passage from St. Paul suggests an additional source of conviction (of a kind that Shelley did not consider) in matters appertaining to what we can or cannot believe:

'For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another'.

('Romans', 2:14 – 16). 

Again, a passage much beloved by Craig, who states: 'Paul says that this Creator has implanted his moral law in the hearts of all persons... Here Paul says that the requirements of God’s law are written on the hearts of all people, even non-Jews who don’t have the Mosaic Law, and therefore they do by nature what the law requires. There’s a kind of common moral code that permeates the world’s societies that is rooted in the conscience of man. Paul says that our conscience bears witness and tells us what to do and what not to do. Therefore, all persons everywhere through God’s general revelation can know that there is an eternal, powerful Creator of the world before whom we are morally responsible and, based on what Paul says in Romans 1, morally guilty and whose forgiveness we need. That can be known by anybody anywhere. That’s God’s general revelation in nature and conscience'.

The notion of the Creator's moral laws having been implanted in the hearts of all persons brings to mind the so-called trademark argument of  René Descartes, (1596 – 1650), that we can know that God exists because he has left his trademark, so to speak, (the distinguishable sign, the idea of God, that identifies the source of the created thing), in us, his creation. As Descartes' explains:

'... we must necessarily conclude that, from the mere fact that I exist, and that the idea of a sovereignly perfect being, that is to say of God, is in me, the  existence of God is very clearly demonstrated. It remains for me only to examine how I have acquired this idea; for I have not received it through the senses, nor has it ever presented itself to me unexpectedly, as do the ideas of sensible objects, when these things present themselves or seem to present themselves to the external organs of my senses. Neither is it a pure production or fiction of my mind, for it is not in my power to take away from it or to add to it. And consequently there remains nothing more to say, except that, as with the idea of myself, it was born and produced with me at the moment of my creation'.

One might as well say, there is the idea of infinity within us, therefore infinity exists; it may or may not, but its existence is not entailed by our idea of infinity. Of more interest here is the issue of how well we can know our own minds, and how well, if at all, we can know the minds of others. 'Knowing One's Own Mind' is the title of an article by Donald Davidson, (1917 – 2003), which begins: 'There is no secret about the nature of the evidence we use to decide what other people think: we observe their acts, read their letters, study their expressions, listen to their words, learn their histories, and note their relation to society. How we are able to assemble such material into a convincing picture of a mind is another matter; we know how to do it without necessarily knowing how we do it'. And as Ludwig Wittgenstein, (1889 – 1951), has proposed, whatever ontological concerns we may have with regard to other minds they may be eased by what is an essential aspect of our use of certain mental predicates; that is, our application of them to others is based upon behavioural evidence. As Wittgenstein explains:

'Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations. - One says to oneself: How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing? One might as well ascribe it to a number! - And now look at a wriggling fly and at once these difficulties vanish and pain seems able to get a foothold here, where before everything was, so to speak, too smooth for it.... And so too, a corpse seems to us quite inaccessible to pain - Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All our reactions are different. - If anyone says 'That cannot simply come from the fact that a living thing moves about in such-and-such a way and a dead one not', then I want to intimate to him that this is a case of the transition 'from quantity to quality'.'

So here is how it works: there is something other in my environment, something neither dead nor inanimate, and towards which I am obliged to adopt an 'intentional stance', in the terminology of Daniel Dennett, (1942 - ); that is, I assume a level of abstraction whereby the behaviour of this other is viewed, by me, in terms of its having possession of mental attributes. Such mental attributes include that of having beliefs; and I can assert my belief concerning the belief of another via a typical subject/predicate proposition. I can confidently assert that 'Craig believes in God'; but then, given that I am able to use such a predicate, which I can, a predicate that issues out of a process of inference from something that I can observe, (the irritating external behaviour of a Christian apologist), to something that I cannot observe, (internal mental states or processes); and given that belief is a mental concept, then, (and this is so with all mental concepts), in order for me to be able to use such a predicate, which I am, (which is to say, the predicate is meaningful to me), for this to be possible I have also to use this type of predicate, (that is, the predicating of mental attributes to a subject), that I do use with Craig as I would use such a predicate in connection with myself, ('Proud believes in God'); and further, my use of such a predicate in connection with another, in this case Craig, requires me to identify whose belief it is, in this case, it is Craig's belief.

Having attributed to a particular other, Craig, certain belief states or processes, such states or processes connect, in some manner, to Craig's tendencies to behave, in a certain way. There may be a causal connection between what we believe and what we do, or, if you have philosophical concerns with regard to causality, then, given that mental states or processes of others are known to us through their behaviour, or other connected phenomena, then beliefs are at the very least dispositions to behave, in a certain way. And this is how we can know, on the basis of evidence, the minds of others. Gilbert Ryle, (1900 – 1976), has identified the criteria that would satisfy ‘Craig believes in God)’, (this is not Ryle's example, obviously, I am merely trying to keep the argument moving forward); the criteria are, in effect, an endless list of inferences, imaginings, instances of talking, actions, and so on, on the part of Craig, and not all of which are observable behaviour, (he may be merely sitting down, lost in reverie upon how the supreme Creator of the universe must be eternally grateful (for everything about the Creator is eternal), towards he, Craig, for having devoted his finite life to defending the behaviour of, in addition to establishing the ontological status of, this omniscient and omnipotent Creator). But suppose I believe that the predicate 'Craig knows French’ expresses a truth, (I do not know, in fact, if it does or not); this, then, according to Ryle, is for me an 'inference ticket'; it grants me the right to certain inferences; for example, that Craig understands what he reads in a French newspaper, that Craig can communicate successfully in French; although specifying such entitlements are, of course, rather too precise, as Ryle explains:

'[w]e should not withdraw our statement that he knows French on finding that he did not respond pertinently when asleep, absentminded, drunk, or in a panic; or finding that he did not correctly translate highly technical treatises. We expect no more than that he  will ordinarily cope pretty well with the majority of ordinary French-using and French-following tasks. 'Knows French; is a vague expression and, for most purposes, none the less useful for being vague'.

Ryle is talking here about the mental concept of knowing, but it applies to believing also; 'Craig believes in God', or 'Craig does not believe in God', do have a vagueness about them, but they are certainly useful. And, taken all together, the above concerns that I have outlined do add up to a serious problem for Craig, or for anyone who presupposes that the atheist knows that God exists, and that the God that he knows to exist is the God of the Bible. Craig claims that we are all without excuse, that the unbeliever has rejected God's Holy Spirit voluntarily, which presupposes that the unbeliever believes in God's Holy Spirit, for otherwise he or she could not have rejected it. But to Craig we can retort: tu quoque! It is Craig that is without excuse here, in making such a claim; he is the epistemically irresponsible one, in his unwillingness to remove the false medium through which he views the subject, to use Shelley's phrase; the subject in this case being the atheist.  For given the direct evidence (of the kind we have just outlined) that we have with regard to what someone else believes, we can then know, on the basis of such evidence, that an atheist believes what he or she professes to believe. (But here we must make clear what 'atheist' signifies, as this is often misunderstood. Shelley, in a later and slightly expanded version of his tract, clarifies the definition of atheism: 'There is no God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken'. And then he signs off his tract with: 'Thro' deficiency of proof, AN ATHEIST'. That is to say, an atheist is someone who disbelieves in God on the grounds of insufficient evidence. Carlos Baker, (1909 – 1987), suggested that Shelley is really arguing for the necessity of agnosticism, and not of atheism. But this is clearly mistaken; or rather, agnosticism is atheism).

But then, though an indispensible component in our use of mental predicates is that we apply them on the basis of behavioural evidence, this is evidently not the case when we apply such predicates to ourselves. And does this not suggest that claims that are without evidential support can on occasion be more trustworthy than those without? Graham Wallas, (1858 – 1932), recounts how: 'The little girl had the making of the poet in her who, being told to be sure of her meaning before she spoke, said “How can I know what I think till I see what I say?”'

'Don't think, but look!', advised Wittgenstein. Shelley necessarily believes what he believes, on the basis of the operation of his reason upon his experiences and observations, these latter of which he can turn into exquisite poetry; and 'poetry is a mirror', he says, 'which makes beautiful that which is distorted'. Only a Christian apologist, who thinks without looking, could convince himself, or herself, that a loving God can condemn those objects of love to the everlasting torments of Hell. Shelley, necessarily, cannot believe this; in his own time he would have observed believers like Craig, who claim to know what they cannot know, and who would know what they do not know were they not observing through a distorting medium, so that they see 'God's sweet love in burning coals'; (which is perhaps also an allusion to Proverbs 25:22: 'For you shall heap coals of fire on his head, and the LORD shall reward you'). And were he with us today, here is a response that Shelley would make to Craig, and his ilk:

Tis a lie to say, 'God damns'!

Where was Heaven's Attorney General

When they first gave out such flams?

Let there be an end of shams,

They are mines of poisonous mineral.

Statesmen damn themselves to be

Cursed; and lawyers damn their souls

To the auction of a fee;

Churchmen damn themselves to see

God's sweet love in burning coals.

The rich are damned, beyond all cure,

To taunt, and starve, and trample on

The weak and wretched; and the poor

Damn their broken hearts to endure

Stripe on stripe, with groan on groan.

Sometimes the poor are damned indeed

To take, - not means for being blessed, -

But Cobbett's snuff, revenge; that weed

From which the worms that it doth feed

Squeeze less than they before possessed.

And some few, like we know who,

Damned - but God alone knows why -