Can a stripped-down naturalism really match theism’s explanatory ambitions, or does it secretly inherit the very mysteries it’s meant to avoid?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Graham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, and specializes in Philosophy of Religion.
2. Interview Summary
Oppy opens by stressing that debates about God rarely turn on a single knockdown proof, and he thinks there are no convincing arguments for God (or against) that should force assent. Still, he thinks some arguments are instructive and carefully built: he says he recently published a long paper on Thomas Aquinas’s First Way, and argues that you can make it deductively valid only by weakening the conclusion, whereas the stronger Thomistic conclusion needs extra premises. He adds that he finds ontological arguments especially interesting, and wrote a book-length study cataloguing different kinds of them. When asked who presents the strongest case for theism, he points to Richard Swinburne, praising The Existence of God as a well-constructed cumulative-case presentation, even though he remains unconvinced by it.
A recurring theme is that many “cosmological” moves look dialectically symmetric: whatever explanatory pressure you feel about a first cause, a beginning, or an initial explanatory posit arises just as much for the naturalist as for the theist. In response to contingency arguments, he’s happy (in principle) to grant talk of a “necessary being” so long as it’s identified with the initial, fundamental part of causal reality on a naturalistic picture. He also presses a familiar worry (associated with Peter van Inwagen): if you start from something necessary and claim “all contingency” comes from it, you still owe an account of whether the link is necessary or contingent, and either answer threatens the intended contingency/necessity contrast. Relatedly, when people build modalized explanatory principles into “new” cosmological arguments, he notes that the contingency of the God–world relationship can reintroduce pressure for explanation of God’s creating (or of God) rather than cleanly stopping the regress.
On methodology, Oppy says he’s skeptical that a Bayesian framework is doing the real work in many cumulative cases; he prefers an ‘argument from dominance’ where naturalism wins by being simpler while (he claims) not being explanatorily worse once the “evidence” is partitioned appropriately. This connects to a more general ‘Occam’s razor’ stance: when two theories do the same explanatory work, adding extra entities (like God) without added explanatory payoff is something you should reject, not merely remain agnostic about. He applies the same measured attitude to theological doctrines: he thinks the Arguing About Gods posture is “suspend judgment unless pushed,” and while he’s open to the coherence of the Trinity (a low bar, in his view), it remains hard to make sense of outside the tradition. He also discusses Pascal-style prudential arguments, warning that “choose to believe” is psychologically suspect and that infinite-utility setups can collapse comparisons, and he’s similarly deflationary about the “hard problem” of consciousness, endorsing an identity-theory line in the spirit of J. J. C. Smart.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:10 - Aquinas’s first way
01:06 - Best argument for God
02:41 - Theistic literature
04:53 - Contingency argument
07:19 - Kalam cosmological argument
11:46 - Act and potency
13:54 - Cosmological arguments and modality
20:16 - Bayesian analysis of theism
23:32 - Consciousness
25:15 - Artificial intelligence
26:45 - Spacetime
28:13 - God and space
29:31 - Divine simplicity and monotheism
32:59 - Pascal’s wager
37:36 - Principle of sufficient reason
39:45 - Causal series
43:50 - Coherence of the trinity
45:06 - Simplicity and agnosticism
50:07 - Account of modality
51:49 - Rasmussen’s argument
59:02 - Mathematical entities
1:01:21 - Platonism
1:05:19 - Causal origin
1:09:23 - Arbitrary limits
1:12:25 - Classical theism
1:14:27 - Divine simplicity
1:17:10 - Unities and unifiers
1:21:56 - Holism and reductionism
1:23:23 - Conclusion
