Secular Right

I was intending to buy Ed Feser’s book as more background material for my half-baked next-project-but one: a handbook for secular conservatives.  Reading his exchanges with Heather, though, and the stuff he’s posted on his site, I think I’ll pass.  I’m getting the impression of a shallow and arrogant guy who has never reflected seriously on modes of thinking other than his own.

E.g. he justifies his “courtier’s reply” position (i.e. “come back and discuss this with me when you’ve read as many heavy-duty books on philosophy and theology as I’ve read”) by analogy to a physicist dealing with questions from a person ignorant of physics.  That misses a couple of key points.

First, professors of physics mostly do not trade in courtier’s replies.  They make a patient effort to put across some of the basics, which — even in the case of quantum mechanics — are not completely inaccessible to an intelligent layman. I’ve written a couple of pop-math books and I field emailed questions about them, often from argumentative readers, every day. I don’t do this by telling inquirers to go off and read Euler, Gauss, and Hilbert.  I try to set them straight, and am surprisingly often rewarded with “Oh, I see!”

Second, our inquiries of theologians and believers are not about the nature and workings of the supernatural, but about its existence. 

Why would a layman go and read a shelf of books about the natural sciences? Well, because he is surrounded by natural phenomena impinging on his senses. He sees glowing discs moving across the sky in a regular way; he sees fire leap up when a match is struck; he sees unsupported objects fall; he notices that some twins are identical and some not. What’s it all about? If he’s curious, he will invest some effort in exploration. He’s not in any doubt about the existence of the natural world. He wants to know how it works.

The objects of Mr. Feser’s studies are, by definition, not part of the natural world. It is possible to go through a long life without ever having any experience of God.  (Trust me on this.)  A fortiori for experience of the Afterlife …  We don’t seek to know how these things work, we seek to know why we should believe they exist; or, supposing they do exist, why, since they do not impinge upon us in any way we are aware of, why we should be bothered with them, and why people who do believe in them should monopolize our political faction. 

If Feser cannot reply to these simple fundamentals, as a physicist easily could (“You don’t think fire exists? Hold still while I stick this lighted match up your nose”), we are bound to suspect that either (a) he is a sensationally incompetent presenter of his subject, or (b) the subject is a bogus one. 

Feser’s answer is “Go read a shelf of books.”  But what would be our motivation for investing so much time reading about an object which shows no signs of existing?  Where are the glowing disks and identical twins to excite our curiosity?  If Feser can’t, in a few plain sentences, give us some good reason to think that God exists, why would we go delving into arguments about the Trinity and Hypostatic Union?  And if we invested all that time and effort, and still came away unconvinced of the existence of God, who would recompense us for our trouble?  Bertrand Russell read through all the Scholastics for his History of Western Philosophy, but came away as much an atheist as before.  How do I know I wouldn’t repeat that experience, without Russell’s hope of a bestselling book to follow?

If Feser can’t put across the fundamentals of his … discipline to a person as intelligent as Heather, I feel no motivation to read his book. Although, if he would just come up with that design plan for a dispositive efficacy-of-prayer experiment, I might change my mind.