The RE Podcast
The RE Podcast
S15 E3: The One About Metaphysics
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I LOVED this chat with Dr. Martin Pickup so much. He is an associate professor in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham and Director of the Birmingham Centre for Philosophy of Religion. His particular specialism is metaphysics and the Philosophy of Religion so we had a lovely chat about these two things; specifically What metaphysics, how it's changed over time and how this has impacted philosophy of religion. We discuss analytic theology, Leibniz and the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the Ontological Argument and look to the future of metaphysics.
Martin also tells about a new project he is working on - a global philosophy of religions project!
If you teach Philosophy or Religious Studies A-level then I think you will find this chat really helpful. It is also really accessible so your A-level students might find it useful too!
Find out more;
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Webiste: www.therepodcast.co.uk
Searching for fresh approaches to teaching the nature of God, business ethics, or knowledge of God topics for OCR A-level religious studies. Cooper Education has you covered this June and July. Join their live CPD webinars focused specifically on these key areas. Expertly delivered by Chris Eyre. Chris will equip you with the knowledge, strategies, and insights needed to effectively deliver these complex and crucial areas of the syllabus. Head over to CooperHeneducation.com to explore their webinar schedule and book your place. That's C-O-O-P-E-R-E-CA.com. And here's the great part. You can book today, and Cooper Education will simply invoice your school for payment after the webinar. So there's absolutely no upfront cost for you. On top of that, as a listener of the RE podcast, use code REPOD20, that's R E P O D 20 before the 31st of May at the checkout to get 20% off. Elevate your RE teaching this summer. Visit CooperHeneducation.com. Use code Repod20. Now let's start the show. Welcome to the RE podcast, the first dedicated RE podcast for students and teachers. My name is Louisa Jane Smith, and this is the RE Podcast. The podcast for those of you who think RE is boring, which it is, and I'll prove it to you. My guest today is Martin Pickup, Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham and Director of the Birmingham Centre for Philosophy of Religion. His particular specialism is, wait for it, metaphysics and philosophy of religion. And I'm excited to explore the interplay between those two things today. So welcome to the podcast, Martin.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks very much, Louisa. I'm delighted to be here to have a chat with you.
SPEAKER_01:We're so happy to have you. And I've had quite a few lovely conversations from a lot of your colleagues from Birmingham University. And it's so helpful, I think, to bridge that gap between sort of the experts in academia and what we're trying to do in the classroom. So this is such a great privilege for us. Do you want to just introduce who you are to the listeners?
SPEAKER_00:Sure. So as you say, I'm in the philosophy department here at the University of Birmingham. I work on lots of kind of big and abstract sounding questions like what's the world really like? And does God exist? And if so, what might God be like? So yeah, I'm one of those people who gets to delve into that sort of stuff, and I think it's a real privilege. And it's also a privilege to be able to talk with people like you about it and for your listeners to engage. So yeah, it's great to be here.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And I think everyone listening is going, oh yes, so we love that stuff. You know, I don't know about you, but I'm not great at small talk. I want to get down into like the sort of big questions of the world, which is unnerving for people, I think. So it's really lovely to kind of geek out. Like any good teacher, I want to start by defining our terms. So if we use this word metaphysics, what do we mean by it?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, great question. And I mean, this might be familiar to your listeners, but actually defining what metaphysics is, like in some other areas of philosophy, is itself a philosophical question. So there is a philosophical question here about what counts as metaphysics, what's metaphysics about? But I won't go into the weeds on that because otherwise that'll take up the rest of our time together. I mean, one way of thinking about what metaphysics is, is something like an attempt to investigate the fundamental nature of reality. And that includes those sorts of big questions that people might be interested in once they've been down the pub for a few hours and or kind of questions that four-year-olds ask, like, what is time? What does it take for something to be the same thing over time? You know, am I the same person that I was when I was 10 years old? Other questions like, you know, if there's a blue jumper and a blue chair, we say they're both blue, what is it really that they have in common? What is the thing that is blueness? So there's lots of those sorts of questions around. And one type of question that we deal with in metaphysics is something like what sometimes gets called ontology, a question of what exists. So if you were going to do like a laundry list of everything that the world contains, what gets on the list and what doesn't? So would holes, for instance, you know, the middle of a donut, does that get on the list or not? So as well as just a kind of list of what things there are in the world, we might also want to wonder about what types of thing are there? Are there only material things that I can touch with my fingertips, or are there things that are abstract? Maybe numbers are like that. Do they exist? If so, in what way? And then there's also within metaphysics questions about what's the relationship between different types of thing. Are some more fundamental than others? When you put lots of stuff together in a certain way, do you get a new thing or do you still just have a collection of the original things? So it's also about the kind of structural relationships between the things that the world contains. So what does the world contain, but also how is it arranged and what types of things are there? That's sort of my understanding at least of what sorts of questions metaphysicians might be interested in.
SPEAKER_01:That's so helpful. And actually, it's interesting you talked then about the relational side of it. Because actually, my next question is about the sort of relationship between metaphysics and God. Right. So, actually, how does metaphysics relate to God? Now, obviously, you've said one of the questions you ask is about what exists, and so therefore asking questions about God existence would be that. But sort of talk to us about the relationship between metaphysics and God.
SPEAKER_00:As you've picked up on already, one of the obvious points of contact between these is that, well, when we're asking what things exist, one of the natural things that people tend to ask is, does God exist? And that is usually a bit more contentious than questions like, you know, do chairs exist? So one point of contact between these two things is just the question of, you know, on our laundry list of items that reality contains, do we put God as an entry on that list? And if so, what would God be like? And what sort of kind of features would God have? But there are other sorts of relationships, maybe slightly more subtle relationships between philosophy of religion and metaphysics too. So in order to do metaphysics, you need to think about what principles are we going to have, what seem like reasonable ways to try and organise our understanding of the world? And those sorts of principles can themselves be things that you can then apply to philosophy of religion and think, oh, well, if we think in general it's a good idea to investigate the world in this way, what happens if we then take that kind of idea or claim or assumption and apply it to a God type area? So what happens if we think about, for instance, as I think we might come on to later, think about kind of questions of causation and what causes what? Well, you can answer that question generally, but you can also think about questions, you know, what would it mean for God to cause stuff and what would that look like? So, yeah, there's the kind of big picture question of does God exist? But also lots of the other work that happens in metaphysics has interesting consequences for what we might want to say in philosophy of religion when we're thinking about topics relating to God and the supernatural.
SPEAKER_01:And actually, this is you're talking, I'm relating back to what Dr. Carissa Sharp was saying. And maybe that's the sort of distinction between what her work is in terms of the psychology of religion, because they're not necessarily interested in whether God exists metaphysically, but actually whether the concept of God exists, which it does, and if it does, what impact does that have on society? And so it's quite nice, I think, then to have those two disciplines side by side to see a different approaches to talking about the same thing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and these are really complementary, I think. It's not like there's a turf war here going on. But the people who want to kind of do the metaphysics of this stuff are interested, you know, the sorts of questions they're interested in are the is it true question. Although it's obviously really important as well to work out the answers to the questions, you know, what do people think about this and why do they think it and what impact might that have on their lives? That's all really important as well. But the metaphysician's approach is kind of, in a sense, probably more motivated by a desire to get uh an answer to the question of whether it's true or not.
SPEAKER_01:And can I ask you to differentiate between metaphysics and philosophy?
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Because they seem to have quite a lot of overlap, but there must be something that makes them distinct.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's right. And I think part of this is the fact that at least for a long period in philosophy, metaphysics was one of the kind of classic parts of philosophy. But philosophy is bigger than metaphysics. Metaphysics is just one part of philosophy. So there are other sorts of questions in philosophy that aren't metaphysical questions, like what's the right thing to do? You know, that's an ethics question. Or what is beauty and what makes something beautiful? That's an aesthetics question. Although, you know, metaphysics has an influence there too. Or epistemology, which is the study of evidence and knowledge and how do we know things and what counts as good evidence. Those are areas of philosophy that kind of interact with metaphysics, and metaphysics learns from them, and they hopefully learn from metaphysics sometimes too. But the way we carve it up is we keep kind of philosophy as like the big thing, and the metaphysics is one part of that. But a part of it that at least I think is relatively central, then I would say that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, absolutely because you've dedicated your life to it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_01:And so the next term I want us to explore is this idea of analytic theology.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_01:What is it? And can you sort of give us some examples to help support that definition?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, sure. So maybe the best place to start is with theology. So, again, contentious, but one way of thinking about what theology is is an attempt to understand and explain, maybe, and maybe to some extent assess the claims of particular religious traditions. So if philosophy of religion is kind of maybe one of the questions in philosophy of religion might be, does God exist? A theological question might be something like, how do I make sense of a particular religious doctrine, for instance. And there's lots of theology, that would be any one type of theological question. But the reason I'm mentioning that is because to do theology, just like to do any academic or intellectual activity, we need some tools. And what tools you pick might change the way in which the conversation goes and the sorts of work that you're doing. Interestingly, at least in the Western world, most theology has been done using certain philosophical tools, which are generally drawn from philosophical traditions on the continent of Europe. But there's been a growing movement to try and see what happens if we use some tools of different parts of philosophy, particularly the type of philosophy I do, which sometimes gets called analytic philosophy, and use those tools to try and do the kind of questioning of how do we make sense of religious doctrines within Islam or Christianity or Judaism or Hinduism or whatever. So there's this relationship between doing theology and the intellectual landscape that you're working within. And analytic theology describes doing that work using this particular set of tools that has been developed in analytic philosophy in the 20th and 21st centuries.
SPEAKER_01:And actually what's interesting is just listening to you, I can see how this would equate to the classroom.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:So we can do metaphysics with our students, we can tackle metaphysical questions about existence and what exists and how they relate to each other. We can do theology with our students, and we go, this is what this person believes. But then we can put those things together and actually, particularly if we're looking at GCSC and A level, there are marks for analysing theology, for actually looking at theological statements, claims, beliefs, etc., and actually evaluating the relative merit of them or the weight of them. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I realise I didn't give you any examples, Louisa, despite you asking so much. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Give me some examples.
SPEAKER_00:So for instance, and my work is more in the Christian tradition, although this sort of work gets done in lots of different traditions. But for instance, take the Trinity, a kind of classic Christian doctrine. From the outside, it can just sound like bad arithmetic. You know, you've got one plus one plus one equaling one, whereas everyone knows it ought to be three, right?
SPEAKER_04:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:And people have thought about that for a long time using philosophical tools. And in fact, when the doctrine of the Trinity was developed, it was developed in the context of a certain philosophical environment. So if we're already in metaphysics thinking about questions of identity, what does it take for something to be the very same thing as something else? What does it take for them to be different? Then you might start to get a nuanced understanding of what identity is and various different philosophical claims about identity that you can then apply back to the Trinity and say, when we say the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God, what are we saying? Well, if we interpret it using this kind of funky account of identity, suddenly it might turn out that we're not adding one plus one plus one and getting three. We're doing something a little bit different, and we're able to kind of explain at least one way in which that odd-sounding claim of the Trinity might be able to kind of come out as, if not true or plausible, at least kind of coherent in a way that on the face of it it looks like it might not be. So in talking about the Trinity or other claims about, you know, omnipresence or whatever, you can start to use tools that we already have in metaphysics and apply them to understanding these theological claims in a way that hopefully kind of expands the space of possibilities for comprehending what might be going on.
SPEAKER_01:And that's exactly the word I was thinking of when you were talking, that actually it makes something that's very outside of someone's experience and doesn't fit nicely into our head into something that we create the room to do that.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:And then we can get some really profound understanding of ideas that become a bit more tangible. You know, so you know, I'm thinking that actually most human beings are three in one. So we have three different roles, and we could be given three different names.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:So my children call me one name, and my students call me another name, and my friends call me another name, and my colleagues call me another name. So I have different names and I have different roles, but I'm one person. And so actually analysing that theology makes something profound but also tangible and relatable. So I think that's really helpful. You saw slightly in jest earlier said that although metaphysics is a part of philosophy, that actually is probably the most important part, but certainly it underpins, I think, much of philosophy of religion. So I just want to kind of explore that a little bit more. And in order to do that, we're gonna mention someone that I think most people are gonna be familiar with, and that's Leibniz. Could you just talk to us a little bit about who he was and why what he's sure said and what he's contributed through his writing is sort of relevant to this conversation?
SPEAKER_00:Sure. Yeah, and I should admit right away that I'm a little bit of a fanboy of Leibniz, so this is all gonna come with a slight bias. But yeah, so he was a he's described as the last universal genius because he did work across a whole range of different areas, including philosophy, theology, physics, maths, and so on and so forth, in about roughly 1650 through to about 1715, so that sort of window, and lived in various different places, including Germany and Paris and elsewhere. He was a very profound thinker and a very eclectic thinker, but when it comes to philosophy of religion and metaphysics, he had a view of the world which took it to be ultimately understandable. He took the world to be ultimately somewhere that, at least in principle, can be comprehended. And the reason he thought that is because he thought it was created by a god who was operating through principles according to which that god would just do what made sense, basically. So if you think that the world is created by a god who makes sense, even if we aren't intelligent enough or you know, we're finite and God's infinite, so we can't ever fully understand that God. But nevertheless, if the god makes sense, then the God's going to create a world that itself makes sense, ultimately. And on that basis, he kind of developed a whole metaphysical system and a system of philosophy of religion that kind of tried to explain what the world was like and how we could understand it. And he ended up with some quite radical conclusions about the nature of what the universe is like. Like, for instance, he thought ultimately all there was was a series of mind-like monads, he calls them. So a bit like everything is made of minds, including the table, the desk, the sun, all ultimately made up of simple mind-like entities. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So I'm just trying sorry, I'm just trying to work I mean, I guess that any great thinker has to go on a journey through things that maybe don't end up leading to something that makes sense in order to understand the world. Like you have to take a few wrong turns to kind of see where the edges are of reason. Right. I'm presuming. But I mean, by mind does he mean consciousness, or does he mean just intellect? What does he understand by the mind?
SPEAKER_00:That's a great question. So not necessarily conscious.
SPEAKER_01:No.
SPEAKER_00:But mental in the sense that it would represent things.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:So there's versions of this view, I know it sounds crazy, but there's versions of this view around today. Panpsychism is a view according to which the world is ultimately made up of things which are to some extent mental or mind-like or conscious. I mean, and that's not quite Leibniz's view, but people have toyed with the idea that even at the base level of reality, there's something mind-like there. And it's a wild view, but it's one that he did give some reasons for. And it's of a piece with his general understanding of the way he works, which is very different to the way some other early modern philosophers work, is he get a principle, get a principle that sounds really good, and then just apply it. And if you apply the principle and you end up with a wacky result, just accept the wacky result.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:Now, lots of us might be like, oh, okay, let's go change the principle.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But for him, it's like, no, I can see the principle, and it just turns out that the principle leads to these consequences. I've discovered something new. These consequences are true. Yeah. There's a certain sort of mentality.
SPEAKER_01:And I guess then a table acts as though a table should. Right. You know, that it has characteristics of what it's made of, which is a natural characteristic, and it acts consistently with that, you know, it doesn't do its own thing. So I don't know. It's an interesting one. First of all, I'd like to say I think I've been pronouncing his name wrong for my entire life.
SPEAKER_00:It's not an easy one.
SPEAKER_01:And I will now be saying Leibniz from from here on forward. And I'm therefore assuming that he kind of rejects this idea of God being mysterious and sort of ineffable and that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, although he thinks that God is kind of rational.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But God is perfect and we're not perfect.
SPEAKER_04:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:So it's definitely true that we might not be able to understand God. But that's our fault. Right. Not God's fault, if you know what I mean. Okay. So God is ultimately makes sense, it's just that we might not have the capacities to make sense of God.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:In fact, we don't, he would say, have the capacities to make sense of God.
SPEAKER_04:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:So God is still, in some sense, ultimately beyond us, because God is perfect and we're imperfect on his view. But God's not mysterious in the sense of being like ultimately Confusing. Exactly. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And actually you mentioned there this idea of principles that sort of often people like Leidmits and other philosophers create as sort of a principle.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And that kind of brings me nicely onto my next question, which is something which, again, we're going to be familiar with, which is his principle of sufficient reason.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_01:What is this? And obviously, why then is it based in metaphysics?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So there's different sorts of ways of framing the principle of sufficient reason. And it doesn't help that Leibniz himself gives it in like a dozen different ways, which is not helpful. And we tell our students not to do that.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Just stick to one. But one way of thinking about it is the claim is that everything that's true, every claim that's true, has a reason why it's true and not false. So everything that's the case has a reason why it's the case and not otherwise. Sometimes it's put in terms of causation, so every event has a cause. But I think the more general formulation is just that for every truth, there's a reason why it is so. A reason which is enough to make it so.
SPEAKER_01:Does that then link back to analytical theology in that that's almost the way that we judge whether something is true? If there's a faith claim, we have to know how to work out why that can be true.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah, that's a good thought. So I think there's different ways of doing theology, and there's different ways of doing analytic theology. And I think one way of doing it does try to really assess the truth of these claims and to try and find reasons for them or reasons why they might be false. And maybe someone of Leibniz's type of attitude would go for that sort of approach. But we can also just think of it in a slightly gentler way as kind of model building. So can we build coherent models under which these things are true? And that's a kind of the slightly softer approach. It's not trying to argue that certain claims are true or false, but rather working out whether they're possible or not possible. But you're right that that might not be Leibniz's preference.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I've kind of understood it is that there has to be a sufficient reason. You have to find a reason why something is as it is.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And if you relate that to God, that God is the sufficient reason for the cause of the universe because God has the qualities that would be required to do that. Yeah. Is that accurate? Yes, that's right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So Leibniz has this principle of sufficient reason, which he uses in all sorts of places, including in science, to kind of develop hypotheses and to test them and so on. But he also, as you and your listeners no doubt know, uses it as the basis of a cosmological argument for God's existence in exactly the sort of way you were just describing. So we need an explanation for. For the existence of the universe. What is going to be a good explanation of that? Well, it's got to be a being of a certain type, and it turns out that type is God. So he kind of has this very rationalistic account of the world, but everything needs to be explained, including the existence of the world itself. And he thinks that God does that job.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, it's unashamedly very Western in its linear approach in terms of cause and effect. And so that there's a beginning, and then this beginning has to have been caused by something that was outside time, otherwise it wouldn't be in existence in order to create it, and it has to be more powerful than the combined power of the universe, etc. Is there any point he sort of defines what sufficient means, or how do you know when you've got to a sufficient answer?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, he does, and it's stronger than you might expect. So he says something is a sufficient reason when if you have that reason, you definitely have the thing you're after. So like a sufficient reason for me eating toast this morning rather than cereal needs to give a full explanation of me having toast, such that if the sufficient reason's there, I can't possibly have cereal. And this is a problem for Leibniz, or at least lots of people think this is a problem for Leibniz because it does threaten things like human free will. Because if every choice I make has a sufficient reason, because remember, everything in the world for Leibniz has a sufficient reason, then was I really free to have toast this morning rather than cereal? You know, if the conditions were there that required me to have toast. So people have struggled with this in Leibniz scholarship for a long time to try and work out if there's any scope for freedom if you have this robust version of the principle of sufficient reason that Leibniz does.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And I would imagine it's quite arresting as well in terms of decision making. Right, right, right. You know, because actually one way that I diverge from Leibniz is I don't think humans are rational.
SPEAKER_05:Right.
SPEAKER_01:So therefore, I don't think there is always a sufficient rational reason for everything we do because we have emotion and trauma and you know all sorts of things. Right, right. And we're flawed and we make mistakes. And so, yeah, I think although I guess that would be the sufficient reason. Actually, the reason we did this is because this thing happened in our past or whatever it might be.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I guess so. And that's kind of a helpful link because I think one thing that sometimes gets missed, maybe just because the principle of sufficient reason is best known for being a key plank in a major argument for the existence of God. I think something that's missed is that actually in day-to-day life, and particularly in intellectual life, so in the progress of science, people do tend to operate with the assumption that there's a reason why something has happened. Like the physicists don't go, oh well, you know, that atom moved over there. Why did it do it? Maybe there's no reason. They always think there's a reason, right? And the task of science is to find out what that reason is. And to come back to your example, you know, the psychology case, you know, why did someone choose something rather than something else? It might be related to emotion or to trauma or to, you know, their backstory. But in a way, we're automatically giving another explanation that way. So, in a sense, I think there can be a tendency to kind of just think, oh, the principle of sufficient reason is just silly. But actually, it does seem to guide quite a lot of what humanity, at least in scientific endeavour, has done. So rejecting it might be a bit more of a problem than some people think.
SPEAKER_01:And actually, we were talking just before we recorded that we're both parents. Right. And actually we've had that experience where our child keeps asking why.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And it will ask why until we give them a sufficient reason.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_01:And so actually it seems to be instinctive for us to want to find a satisfactory answer to questions. Right. And I think this is probably where the cosmological argument slightly sits better with me than I think maybe Big Bang, because I think even scientists are saying well, actually, the Big Bang is not the complete answer.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:You know, it's part of the answer, but we have absolutely no idea what caused the cosmic expansion and the conditions by which that suddenly happened at a point.
SPEAKER_02:Right, right.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so I think science seems to not have a sufficient reason for the cause of the universe. It has an explanation of the effect of the cause, but not necessarily the cause itself. So that's really fascinating. You've won me over, right? I think I quite like metaphysics. So let's move on to another of Bleibnit's arguments for the existence of God. Yeah. And moving away from cosmological and more into the ontological argument, which also uses metaphysical principles.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Just remind us what the ontological argument is, and heads up everybody, it's my favourite one. I love it. And what metaphysical principles does it utilize?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so there's a few different versions of the ontological argument, but basically all of them try to move from an attempted understanding of what God would be like if God existed, to the claim that because of that definition of God, God in fact actually does exist. So they all evolve this movement from defining what God would be like, like what is it to be God, moving from that kind of very abstract, apparently inoffensive question to a real concrete conclusion that that entity really does exist. Leibniz has his own version of the ontological argument, as does Descartes, as does Anselm. But what I think the modern version of the ontological argument is maybe the one that best shows the relationship between metaphysics and philosophy of religion on this particular point. So the modern version, which comes from a few people, including Plantinger, starts by talking about possibility and necessity, or in other words, what could be the case or could be otherwise versus what has to be the case. And that's just a straightforward topic in, well not straightforward, that's just straightforwardly a topic in metaphysics, like trying to understand what it means when we say I could have had blonde hair, but I couldn't have been a frog, for instance. Like those both seem like true claims, but what makes them true? And this really interesting tool was developed in the middle to late 20th century called possible worlds. Is this familiar?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So possible worlds are just a kind of technique for talking about different ways the world could have been. And you can use this sort of language of possible worlds to construct an argument for God's existence, which is an ontological argument. So it goes something like this. You start by saying that if God exists, God has to necessarily exist, right? It's part of the concept of God, right? God's this great, tremendous, brilliant being. So if God exists, God's got to be not just existing, but having necessary existence. God's got to kind of have to exist, if God exists at all. But if you define God that way, and you allow that it's possible that God exists, so it's at least possible that God exists. Maybe you think God doesn't exist, but you think it's possible that God exists, then that means you can go and find a possible world. So you can think of these possible worlds as just like, I don't know, different rooms in a massive hotel. And you open a door and you see what's going on in that world. And in one world I might have blonde hair, in one world I have brown hair, and only one of those doors is the door to the actual world. But if you've admitted that God is possibly existent, that means that God exists in at least one of those rooms, right? You're gonna eventually you'll open a door and find God. But if you also have admitted that what it is to be God involves necessary existence, what it is to necessarily exist is to exist in every single room. So that means if God exists in any of the rooms, then it turns out that God has to exist in all the rooms. And our room, the actual world, is one of the rooms, right? So therefore God exists in the actual world. That's a kind of rough and ready version of a contemporary account of the ontological argument that relies on this notion of possibility and necessity that has been developed independently in metaphysics. People weren't doing it to do the ontological argument, they were doing it to understand what it might mean for something to be possible or necessary. It's only later on that people thought, oh well, Plantinger and others thought, well, what happens if we update the ontological argument using this new account of what it is for something to have to be the case and what it is for something to possibly be the case?
SPEAKER_01:And so actually what maybe the challenge is is to prove that the existence of God is impossible. Right. Which I'm presuming is very difficult to do. Yes, but it's much easier to prove something's existence than prove somebody's non-existence.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:So you can't prove that God's existence is impossible, therefore it has to be possible, and if it's possible, then therefore it is necessary.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Is that sort of I mean I'm thinking back maybe to like Huxley and this idea of agnosticism that for Huxley agnosticism is the only real rational belief because in terms of I mean I don't know if I'm making too much of a reach that we cannot reject the possibility that God exists, therefore we have to remain agnostic. But for him, I think it was more that it was not possible to know either way, so therefore we have to remain agnostic.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you're definitely onto something here though, because I think I mean, you know, people take different lessons from this argument, lots of people reject it. I'm not completely persuaded myself either. But one thing it might show is that we can't sit on the fence, right? Either God exists in every possible world, or God exists in no possible world.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Which means either God necessarily exists, or God is, as you say, impossible. But the kind of the agnostic position of well, it's not quite the agnostic position, as you say, because agnosticism's more about knowledge, but that kind of friendly view that, oh, it's possible that God exists and it's possible that God doesn't exist. This version of the argument seems to push us to decide one way or the other. Is it possible that God exists? Because if so, then God actually exists, or is it possible that God doesn't exist, in which case God doesn't exist in the actual world.
SPEAKER_04:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:Because the argument the other way around also works, right?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So yeah, I think it's an interesting use of modality, possibility, and necessity to try and kind of think about the characteristics we would ascribe to God and what consequences those would have for arguments about God's existence.
SPEAKER_01:So I would imagine the sort of trapfall of this argument is that we then start ascribing things to God based on our own positionality. That I guess the reason it's a pitfall is because you have to start with the qualities of God.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:And so it's about how you define that God. And it's starting from a very sort of Christiocentric, Abrahamic, Western idea of God of being all-powerful, all-loving, outside of time, etc. Because you're starting from that position, I'm imagining that then the pitfall, the trap, is then saying, therefore, Christianity is the right religion, because we're proving the exact God that Christians believe in. Is that right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So I mean, among the many objections to the ontological argument, that's definitely a really key one, which is that even if this works, and of course a lot of people think it doesn't, and there are further hurdles to jump over if you think it does, but even if it works, it doesn't deliver you the God of Christianity. All it would give you is a necessarily existing being with some other qualities that you already stapled onto in the first place. But interestingly, I think it is the case, although I'm not an expert in this stuff, but I think it is the case that other religious traditions in other parts of the world as well have had this idea that the fundamental entity is necessary. So I think versions of an ontological argument might transcend different religious traditions. It's just as you say, what that then turns into in terms of the content of the religious tradition is rather different.
SPEAKER_01:And actually, science is also creating an explanation of cause of the universe. And so, although doesn't have the kind of religious language, is looking for an ultimate cause.
SPEAKER_00:Right. Yeah, I think to some extent it might depend on the scientist in particular. I think certainly some understandings of what science is supposed to be doing or trying to do is to provide an explanation of everything. But other accounts of science might say, well, what science is trying to do is provide an account of everything that's scientifically understandable.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Which might not be absolutely everything.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And so sometimes there's this kind of what gets labelled maybe slightly pejoratively as like scientism, the idea that science is going to answer every question that could possibly be asked.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So the Dawkins kind of approach to science, isn't it? Right.
SPEAKER_00:No non-scientific explanation is a good explanation, ultimately, unless it's grounded in somehow a scientific explanation or something like that. But that itself is a philosophical rather than a scientific claim and would need some defence. And people do defend it. You know, there are some materialist reductionists and so on who would give reasons why they think that's true. But yeah, I think it depends again, science, like parts of philosophy, I think is a tool and a brilliant tool. But the question of what use you put the tool to is then the really interesting one to me.
SPEAKER_01:I mean it's I'm sort of somewhere in between. I I reject a lot of what Dawkins says, even though we're actually on the s you know, we both have the same beliefs in relation to God. But I I find it very problematic in his attitude towards religion. But I do believe that if something exists in reality, science will be able to discover it and explain it. I just think sometimes the narrative or the language use is different. So you know, I think that if people have religious experiences, there are those that say they didn't happen, you can't prove it, it's not scientifically possible, it breaks the law of nature. And there's other people going, well, actually there could be an explanation for what happened. And I think science can explain why that thing appeared in the way that it did and made them feel a certain way, kind of neurologically. So I don't think science will answer every single question because I think that's a faith-based statement. But I think if something exists in reality, science should be able to find uh an answer to it because it exists in reality and science studies what is real.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can see that. And that's definitely, you know, I think uh a position that's popular. I'm not 100% persuaded. And even to set aside the God question and that sort of stuff, you know politics, right action, are those the proper targets of scientific explanation?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, that's a good point.
SPEAKER_00:And it seems to me that there could be some truths there that aren't the sorts of truths that the scientific methodology is the right methodology to try and address. I mean that could still be the case, of course, if God doesn't exist and so on. But then what that really zones in on is a really interesting question, which again brings us back to metaphysics of what does reality contain? Does reality just basically contain bits of matter bumping into each other? If so, I mean I know contemporary physics thinks that maybe matter's reducible in certain ways. But basically, if it's just bits of matter bumping into each other, then science should be fine to explain everything. But if reality also contains different sorts of things, like moral principles or justice or irreducible beauty or something like that, then science might not be the right tool to investigate and explain that part of reality. But these are substantive questions, of course.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And actually that's a great question to use in the classroom. Is that can science ever prove that killing is wrong or that love is good or forgiveness is, you know, whatever it might be? I think that'd be a great question to ask in the classroom. Let's just talk a little bit now about how our understanding of metaphysics has changed over time. Right. And therefore how that's impacted philosophy of religion.
SPEAKER_00:Sure. So I know best metaphysics in the kind of Western tradition, although, of course, thinking about what reality is like and doing metaphysics has happened all throughout history in all parts of the world, in various different traditions. But at least in the Western tradition, metaphysics has changed and has had this really interesting symbiotic relationship with science. So in the period we were talking about before, Leibniz's type of period, where we have the scientific revolution just beforehand and ongoing. That also shakes up philosophy. Philosophy has been kind of working on the basis of what Aristotle and then Aquinas have said for a long time. But this kind of experimental results of science are sort of shaking some of the foundations of what people think the world is like from a metaphysical point of view. But also vice versa, kind of increasing flexibility in your account of reality from a philosophical point of view also starts to open up possibilities for doing science and scientific methodology that kind of has been really successful. I guess to give a concrete example, we can come back to talking about the ontological argument in terms of possible worlds. So that version of the ontological argument just didn't exist before late 50s, early 60s, because that language of talking about possibility didn't exist either. So the way that we talk about the world, and it's not just talking about the world, you know, it's trying to understand it, does affect the way in which in philosophy of religion we would then try and apply those tools. So, yeah, there's been an evolution in metaphysics in various ways that has had a corresponding kind of evolution in the way that philosophy of religion then picks up on those tools and uses them to update and adjust and change pre-existing arguments in the light of this kind of new developments. And that makes it sound very linear, it's somewhat cyclical too. So, just as an example, in the 21st century, so like in the last 15, 20 years or so, and a little bit longer ago than that, there's been a resurgence in this kind of Aristotelian style metaphysics, which was out of fashion for, I don't know, possibly hundreds of years, at least still around, but out of fashion. So, yeah, things could go away and come back again. But when they do that in metaphysics, it does tend to have a knock-on effect on the way that we talk in philosophy of religion too.
SPEAKER_01:And I don't even know if you can answer this. Does metaphysics always lead to arguments for the existence of God? Could metaphysics lead to arguments against the existence of God?
SPEAKER_00:Oh yeah, absolutely. And in fact, you know, what we were talking about a moment ago, the kind of idea that maybe the world is just ultimately composed of material parts. That's a metaphysical view.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:That would have the consequence that God doesn't exist. So if you can give arguments in favour of that metaphysical view, you are sort of tangentially giving arguments against God's existence.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So your metaphysical view and your view about whether God exists are quite likely to be intertwined.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:And most metaphysicians are not religious. Most philosophers are not religious. Most philosophers of religion are, but maybe that's just because they're more interested in those sorts of questions, because they've got some skin in the game, if you know what I mean.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think I definitely had a religious faith and then found philosophy. But for me, philosophy then destroyed my faith. Yeah. A part of it did, not all of it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And I think that's a very common story.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. But I think it didn't necessarily destroy my faith, it just made me realize that there was a faith out that was bigger than just the one that I'd been introduced to. And that the concept of faith and belief was much more pluralistic than I thought. And I saw validity in all of those ways of understanding the divine or understanding the nature of humans or what's right and wrong.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:I think it broadened my mind and opened it. Whereas before I had quite a narrow view. What therefore does the future hold? So we kind of take a sort of a step back and gone actually that this evolution of metaphysics has then played out in how we approach philosophy of religion. Where's it kind of going next? What are the sort of big developments that are on the horizon?
SPEAKER_00:Good question. If I had a perfect crystal ball, I think I'd uh that would be really helpful. But I'm not completely sure. But I think what seems to be going on is that there's a kind of, in a really interesting way, a bit of a diversity of metaphysical approaches these days. So topics, as I mentioned before, some topics that previously weren't talked about much, sort of drawing on Aristotelian metaphysics, questions about are some things essential to other things? Like do things have an essence? You know, is there something about you know the table or you or whatever that that kind of you have some core properties that you can't do without in a certain sort of really robust sense? That's come back in.
SPEAKER_01:So that's kind of Plato, with it, this idea of theory of forms and that there is dogness and it's kind of related to that, but it's kind of it's Aristotle's updated and more domesticated version of that view.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. Where these properties don't necessarily there are these essential properties, but they they don't kind of inhabit their own special realm.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:The realm of the forms. Plato has this kind of, as you'll know, you know. With this sharp distinction between the material world and then this kind of ultimate reality. Whereas Aristotle's much more grounded, he's much more scientific in that sense, more of an empirical scientist. But he still thinks that there are essences to things. He also thinks that things have powers, so like capacities to do things baked into them.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And there's also in the contemporary discussion, there's questions about fundamentality. So are some things more fundamental than others? Are some things kind of basic and other things arise from them?
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:So there's this question of kind of levels, levels of reality.
SPEAKER_01:So is this more tautological in that things have a defined essence that makes it what it is? And therefore Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And so Aristotle was motivated a lot by the question of how to answer the question, what is it?
SPEAKER_04:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:And that went out of fashion because, in like, I don't know, the 1700s, people started to think maybe there's no really big difference between a chair and a cat and a tree and the sun. They're all just ultimately made of similar material bits. But in the contemporary discussion, it's starting to look like at least some people are trying to say that maybe there is an important answer to the what is it question that doesn't rely on just kind of a reductionist approach.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And so certain sorts of properties or features might be core to you, essential to you, in a way that gives a different sort of explanation.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So I guess maybe one way of reframing this that I should have started with perhaps is what counts as an explanation in metaphysics is something that is being discussed and contested now in a way that maybe 50 years ago there was a bit more of a common shared understanding of what counts as a good metaphysical explanation. And that's really kind of exciting because lots of new avenues are opening up, but it's also a bit confusing because it makes it a little bit harder to talk to each other and work out if we all agree on stuff or not.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So what the future holds for metaphysics, yeah, I think my hunch is there'll be a proliferation of different methodologies that will be fruitful, but also might make it harder to feel like we're all on the same path.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Gosh, it's interesting because I I asked the question to the students quite a lot, like, what does it mean to be human? What does that term mean? And and that's a metaphysical question. Right. You know, actually, isn't it? So and it's very, very difficult to get an answer. Because they're saying, well, it's a level of intelligence. And then I'm like, well, actually, then does that mean that the more intelligent you are, the more human you are, or is that you are sentient or conscious? And I said, well, then does that change what a human is if they're unconscious? And then does that change the way that we treat them if they're unconscious?
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:And I sort of always break it down and say that actually a human is someone with human DNA. That's the only thing really that is common to all human beings in whatever state of intelligence or consciousness or morality they are, sort of thing. So I just think, you know, I always want to think what you're saying is is so applicable to the things that we can do in our classrooms. You know, we can do metaphysics in a way that is accessible to teenagers, which I think is really interesting.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I think that quite often accidentally people are doing metaphysics without realizing that they are. Right. Especially in an RE classroom.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I think some of the assumptions that go into lots of the arguments that will be analysed and discussed ultimately come down to assumptions and disagreements about metaphysics, about what the world is fundamentally like, and that feeds in in really interesting ways downstream, as it were, to lots of other stuff.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. Just before we close, I do want to just talk about this project that you're involved in. Yeah. Yeah. Which is about sort of global philosophy of religions. Right. Can you tell us a little bit more about the project and sort of what you're hoping to achieve from it?
SPEAKER_00:Sure, sure. So yeah, we've recently, in the last couple of months, started a major research project, the aim of which is to try and well, go back a step. In at least in Anglo-American philosophy of religion, there's really been a focus on Christianity and a certain sort of Christianity as being the target of what we're thinking about. And that's good. Or it's good that people think about that. But the aim of the project is to try and broaden and diversify the type of work that's being done in philosophy of religion, both in terms of the traditions that we're interested in and that people talk about, so whether that might include paganism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, etc. etc. Maybe also the spiritual but not religious, who are a growing category. What do those people think and how might they be engaged in philosophy of religion? But also thinking about the geographical diversity. So what do people who are in different parts of the world have to say at a research level about these questions? Not just people who live in the UK and the US and Canada and so on. So the aim is to try and get more voices and more different voices engaged in the questions that philosophy of religion is interested in so that we can make hopefully some concrete progress on trying to address these sorts of questions. So that's the kind of pitch, as it were. And then within that, what we're trying to do in this version of the project, because we had an earlier project that was beginning this work, is we're thinking about questions to do with the meaning of life, human purpose, what it is to live well, and how, if at all, those things might be related to spiritual reality. So we've got these diversity of religious traditions and diversity of places. In those traditions and places, what do people think about what the meaning of life is and how that might be related to something beyond the immediately visible world or not? So yeah, so that's the kind of the aims for the project we've got over the next few years, which I'm really excited about. I mean, it's pretty daunting.
SPEAKER_01:It's huge.
SPEAKER_00:But it's also, I hope, going to be a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Because I think it's really interesting. If we're talking about the nature of reality, we cannot talk about that unless we have a very diverse concept of that from different people's perspectives to see what the sort of commonality is. If you are quite narrow in your scope of from whose position are we understanding these questions, then you can never really understand the true nature of reality because it's filtered and funneled through one or two types of experiences, which historically has been white men. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. From a sort of Western perspective. And so it's really exciting, I think, because it means that we're drawing on much more rich knowledge because it's diversifying. So that's fantastic. Thank you so much. And any final thoughts that you want to just leave our listeners with?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I suppose just to follow on from that final thing is that it might be worth people knowing that as well as kind of diversifying philosophy for religion, there's also lots of work going on in philosophy more generally to diversify perspectives. So, for instance, another area, as you know, that I work on with Leibniz is early modern philosophy. There's a really interesting initiative or set of initiatives to rediscover female early modern philosophy voices from Europe. You know, what was Emily Duchatelet saying? What was Anne Conway saying? So I think I just would encourage people to, I know everyone's busy, but you know, to keep an ear out for ongoing research on figures that might move beyond the Descartes, the Leibniz, um, the Hume. Because as brilliant as those people are, and I do think they're brilliant, there's also emerging research on other figures that would help to kind of throw different perspectives on some of these questions that will be tackled in the classroom. That sounds like I'm giving extra work to people, which I don't want to. But no, but as a final thought, it's just that yeah, I think philosophy is diversifying, and I hope that's something that will in time be a real resource for teachers too.
SPEAKER_01:And actually, you know, Martin, to be honest, if you think about key stage one, two, and three, there is very much this diversification of where we're drawing our knowledge from, and we're trying to make it much more diverse. We've got that freedom in those key stages to kind of draw on ideas and thoughts from a global perspective. And so having a look at Indian philosophers and mathematicians and astrologers and and their contributions, where we've got the issue is the exam stuff. And so, actually, what we need, and I'm hoping that there are people from exam boards listening, you know, because they decide, you know, particularly where we do philosophy of religion, which is usually at A level, they decide the philosophers that we study, and so we're very much bound by that curriculum. And so while our key stage three and below curriculums are really diversifying and becoming much more a global perspective, like diverse perspectives from different races, cultures, genders, that's really interesting. It's the GCSEs and the A levels that really need to change. And actually, we have much less control over that. So, you know, I think that some work needs to be done on that level. And obviously, if there's anyone from the DFE and the government listening, which I'm sure you will do because you all have time to, yeah. That in terms of the curriculum and assessment review that's happening right now by DFE, that I think is something that we have really called for to say that actually our GCSE and A-level curriculums are very biased and they need to have much more diversity in them to make them much, much richer and to prepare our students for life in the 21st century world. You know, that we are not mostly going to be living in our own little worlds in our own towns for the rest of our lives, that you know, we've got to prepare them. And also we want our students to see themselves in the curriculum. And we don't often do that because actually we're often just looking at pictures of white men all of the time. And so, yeah, I think uh it's so important in terms of the future of our students and them thriving and being successful if the black, brown, white, gay, female students in our classrooms can see the contributions of people that look like them.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. And just to kind of to support that, and there is research and resources happening in these sorts of areas in universities, not just our project, lots of other projects too. So, you know, this is this is a direction of travel at the at the university level, and hopefully that will mean that there are resources available and there's pressure put on to line up the GCC and A-level curricula with what's actually being done.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. Let's hope so. And Martin, if you could wake up tomorrow and one thing was different about the world, what would you want it to be?
SPEAKER_00:Well, you mentioned earlier on that I have small children. So to be honest, I think very selfishly, I think what I'd like to change is what the time was when I woke up. Probably about three hours later.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, yes, yes. Are you not a morning person?
SPEAKER_00:I am very much not a morning person. And yeah, being a night owl doesn't really work anymore.
SPEAKER_01:It's not conducive with having young children, is it, when you're a night owl.
SPEAKER_00:So yeah. Bangsome sleep, that would probably be what would change at least my quality of life most. Yeah.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:You know, world peace and all that stuff as well. But sleep too.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. There is a moment in parity where you can lie in and your children can get up and make their own breakfast and do their own thing, and it's not gonna lie, it's glorious, absolutely glorious. So you can start your day when you want to. And I think if it I think if more people were laid in, I think the world would be a nicer place. I think a lot of sleep-deprived, grumpy people out there.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:No, 100%. Thank you so much, Martin. It's been so brilliant, and you know, I love philosophy of religion, I love metaphysics, I love talking about these issues and actually talking about it with someone that is challenging me and challenging my knowledge and practice, but in a way that's really accessible and invigorating has been such a privilege. So thank you for giving up your time.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, not at all. It's a total pleasure, and I've really enjoyed chatting, and I've been challenged in a different way too, to try and think through things from a different angle.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So, no, it's been delightful. I've really, really loved this chat so much. So thank you so much. My name is Louisa Jane Smith, and this has been the R.E. Podcast. The podcast for those of you who think R.E. is boring, but it's not. It gets right to the heart of what it means to be human and how to make sense of the world around us. But thank you so much for letting us bore the light out.