A Conversation with Andrew Pessin 

About

The God Question:  What Famous Thinkers From

Plato to Dawkins Have Said About the Divine

(Oneworld Publications, 2009)

Is it true that you got your idea for this book while reading about the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

Absolutely.  If you don’t know who – or what – the Flying Spaghetti Monster is, then you need to go google it right away.  Basically members of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster – who call themselves Pastafarians – believe that the universe was created by a supreme being who happens to look a lot like a pile of spaghetti, with noodly-appendages and all.  (There are perhaps schisms in the Church over precisely what role, if any, meatballs played in the creation process.)  They have lots of arguments for the existence of this being, and much discussion about his precise attributes.   They now have lots of adherents all over the globe.  And they pride themselves on offering much more exciting merchandise than the other mainstream religions.

So what does that have to do with your book?

Well, as you read through their material you can’t help but appreciate how clever it can be – it is obviously satirical, and obviously aimed primarily to be fun – and yet, at the same time, it is oddly very serious as well.  As I read through it I began to think that, perhaps, from the outside, to someone discovering them for the first time, the writings by the great western philosophers about God might in fact sound strangely similar in tone (and maybe even content!) to those by the Pastafarians.  And thus the idea for this book -- which is something like a compendium of the most interesting and unusual arguments for, against, and just generally about God made by the great western thinkers -- was born.

So who are some of the great western thinkers?

Well, the book starts from the beginning -- with Plato, the father of western philosophy, who was born twenty-five hundred years ago -- and works its way chronologically through the great periods of medieval philosophy and early modern philosophy, through twentieth-century philosophy, and then wraps up by looking at some of the arguments made in best-selling books from just the last couple of years.  Along the way it looks at the ideas of some of the most famous thinkers of all time:  in the medieval period these include not only such Christian saints as Augustine and Aquinas but also the great Islamic thinker Averroes and the hugely influential Jewish rabbi Maimonides, and in the early modern period these include such well-known names as René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Immanuel Kant.  As its gets into contemporary times it looks at the ideas of such thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Martin Heidegger.  And as I mentioned, it closes with a look at the best-selling recent work of thinkers such as the Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett and the Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins.

These sound pretty heavy!  Does a reader have to know a lot of philosophy to appreciate what these thinkers have to say?

Absolutely not!  The God Question is designed to be accessible.  The chapters are all very short:  no more than 600 words apiece, readable in just a few minutes.  And each chapter is self-contained, so it’s not necessary to refer backwards or forwards or make any other connections in order to understand any given chapter.   Most importantly, the book is not attempting to provide readers with something like the complete philosophical systems of any of the thinkers it covers.  People write extremely long books about Aquinas, and Descartes, and Heidegger, trying to make detailed and dense sense of all the detailed and dense things these great thinkers have to say.  The God Question is not that.  Rather, it distills out one or two of the most interesting, important, or sometimes even strange things that each of its thinkers has said about God, and presents that thing clearly and succinctly.

Can you give examples of some of the “interesting, important, or sometimes even strange things” that various thinkers have said about God?

Well the quickest thing to say is that pretty much every single thing said about God by the great thinkers has been simultaneously interesting, important, and strange.  In fact when I teach the philosophy of religion I often begin the semester by suggesting that of the many billions of people who have adhered over centuries to the western religions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, most of them would not even recognize the idea of God as it has been developed and defended by the leading philosophers of those religions.  Indeed the philosophers have often run into trouble with the leading religious authorities, who also often don’t recognize the philosophers’ idea of God.  Over the centuries, in fact, many philosophers’ books – and some philosophers – have been committed to the flames.   

But what about some examples, please?

Right!  Just for one, most people think of God as not merely being powerful, but as being very powerful – being omnipotent, in fact.  That’s all well and good until the philosopher begins asking what exactly that means – and quickly generates some puzzles and questions.  Could an omnipotent God, for example, create a stone so heavy He couldn’t lift it?  Well, it seems there are only two possible answers:  Yes, or No.  If the answer is Yes, then there could be something that this God cannot do – namely lift that stone.   And if the answer is No, then again there is something this God cannot do, namely create that stone.  Either way, there could be something this God cannot do – but then how could this God be omnipotent, if there could be things He cannot do?

Now that is heavy – literally!    Who came up with that?

The basic problem is discussed by the great medieval Christian thinker St. Thomas Aquinas, who offers one kind of “solution” to it by defining omnipotence a very particular way.  But that definition didn’t satisfy everybody.  In fact the religious authorities of his time were very displeased, feeling that Aquinas’s “omnipotent” God was in fact limited in power in a way unbefitting the supreme being.  And quite famously, René Descartes, four centuries later, offered his own definition of omnipotence – which most philosophers subsequently rejected as literally unintelligible.  Yet quite recently, in fact, the Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt has shown how Descartes’s definition of omnipotence would offer theists – those who believe in God – a way to respond to the stone problem.

What else have you got?

Well, it’s not just omnipotence that causes problems.  In fact most of the traditional attributes of God – His omniscience, His goodness or benevolence, His eternality – confront very similar problems.  Worse, there are often conflicts between the divine attributes.  Some philosophers argue that God’s perfect goodness, for example, conflicts with His omnipotence – for if He is perfectly good then He should be unable to sin or do evil, but if He is omnipotent He should be able to do everything.  And there are conflicts between the divine attributes and other important components of traditional theism, such as the belief that human beings have free will.  For example, some philosophers urge, if God is omniscient then He knows everything, including everything you will do in the future; but if He already knows what you are going to do, then your future is determined and you are unable to do otherwise, in which case you are not free.  Various philosophers weigh in with very clever ways to respond to some of these problems.  And of course there are plenty of very ingenious arguments attempting to prove the existence of God – as well as equally ingenious counter-arguments, made by theists and atheists alike.

You mention theists.  Are they the primary target audience of The God Question?

Not at all.  As I like to say, this book has something for theists, polytheists, agnostics, atheists, Rastafarians, Pastafarians, and everyone else.   Anyone inclined to believe in God really ought to read this book:  after all, you can’t meaningfully say you believe in something unless you can say a little bit about the nature of the thing – and doing that requires learning a little about what the great religious thinkers have said about the thing.   And similarly for those who may not be sure, or who are downright disinclined to believe:  even to meaningfully reject the existence of a thing requires getting clearer on just what it is that is being rejected – as well as knowing a little bit about the reasons those who believe offer for believing, in order to reject those reasons.  In any case, the book offers a healthy sampling of arguments made not only by theists but also by atheists and even by the downright heretical.  (And as for the Pastafarians – well it wouldn’t surprise me if a few of their number have secretly made their way into The God Question as well.)  In fact you don’t even need to be particularly interested in God to find The God Question interesting, for it turns out that thinking about what God is supposed to be will lead you to thinking about a lot of other interesting and important things:  about whether we have free will, the nature of morality, the relationship between religion and science, whether time is real, and so on.

What is your own state of belief?

My students always want to know this, and I always resist telling them – not because I’m particularly private about it but because it just doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t!) matter for our purposes.  When you’re thinking philosophically about something it doesn’t matter who is making the argument; it only matters whether the argument is any good, or fallacious in some way.   I see my job as helping to present, as clearly and accessibly as possible, the important and interesting (and sometimes strange) things that great thinkers have said about God – for, against, and just generally about God – and then leaving it up to the reader to make up his or her own mind about which of these things is persuasive.

The God Question covers a lot of ground, chronologically.  Isn’t it filled mostly with the thoughts of dead philosophers?  How relevant is it to the issues confronting the world today?

Sure, there are many dead philosophers in it, but there are also quite a few living ones, including ones who’ve written best-selling books in just the past few years!  Nor could there be a better time for a book such as The God Question.   Belief in God – or the diverse forms thereof – is at the center of major world conflicts, and in the West in particular it remains in the crosshairs of an ever-growing public spirit of condemnation.  Is it possible, in the end, to develop a satisfactory and coherent conception of God?  Is there a conception of God which perhaps recognizes the value of reason and science praised by the atheists while remaining close enough to the traditional conception of God to be seen as continuous with it?  And, most importantly, could any conception of God ultimately be acceptable to the diverse communities, of the major Western faiths, who consider themselves to be believers?  These are philosophical questions, as deep and important as they come – and one could hardly be better equipped to begin trying to answer them than by starting with what the best and brightest thinkers have, over the past twenty-five centuries, said about God.

You’d almost think you’re suggesting that world peace might come if only enough people would read The God Question!

You know, that’s a nice idea – and The God Question actually does offer the smallest bit of inspiration in that direction.  In particular, the medieval period gets a pretty bad rap – what with all the crusades, burnings at the stake, and so on.  But when you elevate yourself a little bit above the violent fray, the power struggles, the details of day-to-day-life, you actually discover something quite remarkable in the period.  For while various adherents of the three great Western faiths of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism were busy clobbering each other with maces, the philosophers of those faiths were, to some large degree, working together on what amounted to their joint project of constructing a coherent and plausible idea of God.   Sure, they had concerns that were particular to their particular faiths – but when you read many of the writings of the Christian Aquinas, the Muslims Avicenna and Averroes, and the Jewish Maimonides, for example, you often can see no sign of their particular religious affiliation.  They clearly recognized that whatever their particular differences might be, what they shared was more important and fundamental.  They felt they were all in this thing, this project of making sense of the idea of God, together.

Now if only they were all still around to endorse The God Question to their respective communities across the globe!