Interview with Prof. Peter van Inwagen
Charles Tyler, University of Notre Dame
Peter van Inwagen is the John Cardinal O'Hara Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
CT: What field of study, within philosophy, do you concentrate on in your research? What led you to be interested in this field?
PvI: My philosophical work is mainly in the area philosophers call metaphysics. Metaphysics is the attempt to distinguish appearance from reality. Examples of metaphysical questions are: Do we have free will, or do we simply seem to? Is there such a thing as objective truth — or is the appearance of objective truth no more than appearance? Is there a real world outside the human mind — or is our belief in such a world an illusion? I became interested in metaphysics partly because I wanted to know the answers to questions like the questions I have given as examples of metaphysical questions, and partly because I found that I had things to say in response to them, things that were not quite what anyone had to say about them. (And I found that other philosophers found the things I had to say interesting.)
CT: If given the choice to teach any subject to undergraduates, what topic
would you teach and why?
PvI: Well, it happens that I do have a choice about what to teach undergraduates, and that I almost always teach either a lower-level course in the philosophy of religion or an upper-level course in metaphysics.
CT: I have heard that you will be delivering a paper on the 'problem of
evil' in Russia in the summer of 2005. What do you think is the most formidable
challenge to theism posed by the 'problem of evil.'
PvI: I'm not exactly sure what problem “the problem of evil” is — just as I'm not sure what “the problem of free will” and “the mind-body problem” are. But there are various arguments for the non-existence of God, arguments based on the existence of evil (that is, bad things). One such argument points to the vast amount of evil in the world, and proceeds to its conclusion by way of the premise that if there were a loving and all-powerful God, there wouldn't be evil, or would at any rate be much less of it. Another kind of argument points to some particular evil — the Holocaust or the recent Asian tsunami or the slow, agonizing death of a fawn in a forest fire — and proceeds to its conclusion by way of the premise that if there were a loving and all-powerful God, that particular evil wouldn't exist. (These are really quite different arguments: there might be a vast amount of evil in the world even if no particular evil were troubling to believers in an all-powerful and loving God as the death camps or the Lisbon earthquake; and there might be particular evils of this sort even if the total amount of evil in the world were rather small—at least in comparison with the amount that actually exists.) My own writings on this problem concentrate on arguments like these. One might, of course, identify “the problem of evil” with the problem of what to say (from the theist's point of view) about such arguments. But I don't think that that's what the phrase “the problem of evil” means to most people who use it.
CT: What work is left to be done in making the theist's answers to the
'problem of evil' convincing to atheists?
PvI: Well, I don't know. What do you want the theist to convince the atheists of? That arguments like those I've mentioned are failures — in the sense that a theist or agnostic might be aware of these arguments and fully understand and appreciate them and remain a theist or agnostic (and a perfectly rational theist or agnostic)? In other words: that these arguments do not have the power to force the conversion — on pain of irrationality — of theists and agnostics to atheism? If that's what you mean: (a) I think it's true that these arguments don't have that power, and I've presented reasons to believe this; (b) atheists generally don't find these reasons convincing and continue to believe (I think most of them believe this) that anyone who fully understands the various arguments from evil and who does not become an atheist is irrational. Should I care? Why should I want to give answers to the problem of evil (I have to interpret this as: show that the arguments from evil do not have the power to force those who understand them to become atheists on pain of irrationality) that are convincing to atheists? Wouldn't that be a like a Democrat wanting to find arguments for joining the Democratic Party that Republicans find convincing (or vice versa)? I'm sure it would be nice to have arguments that could do that, but it would be naïve to think that there could possibly be any.
CT: There are many very intelligent people, who appear to be genuinely
investigating the question of whether God exists, who know all of the
arguments on both sides of the issue, and who conclude that God does not
exist. Yet, you are still a theist. Do you think that the disagreement
of your intellectual peers should weaken the strength of your belief in
theism? Why or why not?
PvI: People believe all sorts of things I don't believe, and many of them (in every area of belief) are highly educated and very intelligent. The fact that highly educated and very intelligent men and women disagree with them about all manner of things doesn't seem to bother people when the beliefs in question are about politics or art or philosophy. Those who assent to a certain set of political principles don't seem to find their confidence in those principles “weakened” by the fact that other people, highly intelligent and well-educated people, give their assent to some different set of political principles. Why, then, should people be disturbed by the fact that highly educated men and women disagree with them about religion?
CT: What do you think of the prospects of apologetics, i.e., the sort
of apologetics that seeks to establish that Christianity (or even theism)
is the correct religion, like what C.S. Lewis is trying to do at the beginning
of Mere Christianity ?
PvI: I don't see any real prospect of “establishing” Christianity as the correct religion (that is, as the one religion all of whose teachings and doctrines are true). Christian faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit. What Christian apologists can and should do is to meet particular challenges to Christian belief — the various arguments from evil, the charge that “God is an unnecessary hypothesis,” the various arguments for the conclusion that it's irrational to believe in miracles, the contention that the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation are logically self-contradictory, the thesis that modern, objective scholarship has undermined the authority of the bible, depth-psychological or Marxist “exposures” of the true basis of religious belief. . . It's the business of Christian apologetic to dismantle the various intellectual barriers that the enemies of Christianity have tried to erect between those who are beginning to consider Christianity seriously and their becoming Christians — that and nothing else. As to theism, establishing that theism was the correct position, that would come down to producing arguments for the existence of God, wouldn't it? You can try to find such arguments if you like, but all arguments for the existence of God will be philosophical arguments, and therefore inconclusive — as inconclusive as arguments for the existence of free will or an objective moral standard. If there were a “successful” argument for the existence of God, an argument that would force anyone who understood it to become a theist on pain of irrationality, it would be the first successful philosophical argument. I don't think that such arguments are of much apologetic value — except no doubt in a few special cases (there's just about nothing that wouldn't be effective with anybody).
CT: What did you do in your leisure time as an undergraduate?
PvI: Nothing of any consequence or value.
CT: What books do you recommend undergraduates read in order to become
well-rounded, educated people?
PvI: I'd recommend that they read lots of books. I think it's better for people to read only genre fiction like science fiction any murder mysteries (if those are the only books they really enjoy) than for them to try to slog through The Divine Comedy because they think they should — and then give up halfway through the Inferno and turn the television set on. One hopes that a person who has developed the habit of reading a lot and who has started with genre fiction will one day move on to Dante (or Plato or Tolstoy or T. S. Eliot). But for someone who is prepared to “move on” I have no particular advice about authors or titles. I'd say to them, “Don't worry about it. If you are dissatisfied with the kinds of books you have been reading, if you are looking for “something more,” the books you are looking for will find you.”
