Sobel “no god” excerpt
Excerpt from John Howard Sobel, Logic and Theism: Arguments For and Against Beliefs in God. (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). pp. 24-5. Please note that internal hyperlinks are put there by me to help readers or provide additional information and are my sole responsibility, not Professor Sobel’s or any other party’s.
There are two ways in which one may maintain that even if there is a perfect being, there is no god. There is the way of ‘the objective humanist’, and there is the way of the ‘normative sceptic’. Each is a way to the radical negation that there is no god, no matter what there is, an essentially perfect being, a merely perfect being, the imperfect God of the Bible, and the rabbis, whatever!
8.1 An ‘objective humanist’ might say that there can be nothing to which it would not be beneath the proper dignity of a human being to bend and to worship. He might say that, far from ever being appropriate, worship done by a human being regardless of the object, would be disrespectful of his humanity and wrong. Let a being be perfect, he says, with a not to philosophers and theologians. Let it be whatever ‘turns on’ religious spirits, he adds with a nod to Wettstein‘s rabbis. This being is even so not a proper object of worship, because as a matter of fact, worship is always for every human being and every possible object an improper attitude. Given that a god would be a proper object for a human being (which, until now, has been left implicit) it follows, our objective humanist concludes, that there is no god, even if there is a being that is perfect and everything for which a religious spirit might ask.
8.2 Suppose, however, that our objective humanist is mistaken when he says that it is as a matter fact improper and wrong for a human being to worship. He could still be right when he says that not even a perfect being would be as a matter of fact a proper object of worship. He could still be right about that, if there are facts of the matter of propriety. Suppose this is so. Suppose there are in the vicinity only psychological facts concerning what if any religious attitudes this or that person would, or would not, on reflection entertain toward various beings, including perfect beings. Suppose there are not in addition normative facts concerning what attitudes are proper and prescribed and what attitudes are improper and proscribed, whether or not they are forthcoming for persons. Then, while our objective humanist would be mistaken in his reason for bending and scraping’s being ‘beneath us’, he would be correct in his conclusion that not even a perfect being would be a proper object of worship. The correct reason for this, according to the present line, is that ‘proper’, that is ‘objectively proper’, never correctly applies to attitudes. This way to say ‘ you are no god’ to an essentially perfect being, and to every being, is the way of a ‘normative sceptic’. It is the ‘Mackiean way’.
8.3 John Mackie says that there are no objective values (Mackie 1977, Chapter 1). He says that there are no objective goods or values of universal validity that everyone ought to cherish, whether or not they would be so moved in the end, on fully informed reflection. He holds that there are only subjective values, where a particular person’s goods are the things he would be in the end moved to value. Even so, he maintains, ordinary value thought and talk involves commitments to objective values. Unhedged use of the language of values to ascribe objective values to things is therefore, Mackie says, in error and undermined. Affirmations of objective values are neither true nor false, since there are no such values to be correctly or incorrectly ascribed. [footnote 18 omitted] The suggestion of the previous section is that perhaps the case is similar for gods. perhaps, although there are no possible ‘objective gods’, ordinary ‘God-talk’ of both believers and their opponents expresses, in both affirmations and denials, the idea of a being who would be an ‘objective god’. It could be that, (a) ordinary God-talk, especially impassioned ordinary God-talk, presupposes the possibility of a being who would be objectively worthy of worship, notwithstanding that, (b) as Mackie might say, this idea of objective worthiness for worship is without instantiation in any possible world, which is to say that a being that would be objectively worthy of worship is not so much as a possibility. That (a)-and-(b) condition would be a plague on the houses of both theists and many atheists.