A probing conversation with Graham Oppy on why classical arguments for God often fail to establish their intended conclusions, and on how pragmatics, metaphysics, and Bayesian reasoning shape debates in philosophy of religion.
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
Graham Oppy (a philosophy of religion professor at Monash University) begins by describing how he lost his childhood Christianity around age 12–13, then—after reading Bertrand Russell’s autobiography as a teenager—decided he wanted a life in philosophy. From there, several questions press him on “existential inertia” and classical theistic arguments: he says the label covers different theses, but in the basic sense—if something exists at a time and nothing intervenes to destroy it, it continues to exist—he accepts it (not as a special force, just as the idea that things don’t pop out of existence without a cause or reason). In a related exchange about agency, he’s skeptical of “agents without mechanisms,” arguing that positing such a category is theoretically costly (it multiplies kinds of agents without clear explanatory payoff), whereas ordinary organisms act via mechanisms, and our intuitions about “mechanism-free” agency are both fallible and malleable. He also flags a physicalist/identity-theory picture on which mental states just are brain states, dissolving certain “mysteries” about mind–body correlation.
On religious language and theological discourse, he dismisses A. J. Ayer–style verificationism as self-undermining, and he’s likewise unconvinced by some later “Wittgensteinian” moves in philosophy of religion. A concrete example he uses is Norman Malcolm’s famous line that it can be conversationally odd to say “I believe” when one knows; Oppy follows H. P. Grice in treating this as pragmatics (a norm of being maximally informative), not as evidence that knowledge fails to entail belief. He also notes that the thought that God-talk is “meaningless” because “God” lacks meaning is now rarely defended in academic philosophy, though he mentions Michael Martin as flirting with the idea. And he emphasizes that theological traditions diverge sharply over whether we can form any positive conception of divine attributes: he contrasts approaches associated with Thomas Aquinas (and some early Muslim thinkers) with post-Reformation Protestant traditions that treat “omnipotence,” “omniscience,” and “perfect goodness” as more literally and directly graspable. Stepping back, he suggests philosophy of religion is plural and somewhat siloed: he points to both analytic and continental work (including colleagues and Jacques Derrida–influenced strands), but doubts there will be much integration given how far apart the subfields’ aims and methods can be.
When the discussion turns to what counts as a “good case” for theism, he recommends thinking in a cumulative-evidence style associated with Richard Swinburne: rather than expecting a single knockdown proof, you weigh a wide range of considerations (evil, the existence of the universe, and so on), and many of the relevant “data” will overlap across different theistic religions. On specific doctrines, he argues that even if one claims God’s omniscience is “non-propositional,” it still appears to commit you to the truth of a vast range of propositions, so the maneuver may not change as much as advertised. On classical arguments, he distinguishes (i) whether a conclusion is actually a logical consequence of the premises from (ii) whether the premises are true; and he reiterates his view (from Arguing About Gods) that, at least for the first three of Aquinas’s Five Ways, the intended conclusion does not follow from the stated premises (and he’s unsure, on the spot, how much he said about the fourth and fifth). Finally, in a later exchange about Bayesian reasoning, he voices familiar worries about “subjective Bayesianism”: in empirical domains with lots of data, priors (within limits) tend to wash out, but in data-poor areas, demanding precise numerical credences can feel arbitrary because we lack the kind of evidence that would drive convergence.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:14 - What got you into philosophy
01:11 - Existential inertia
04:53 - Ultimate causal explanations
15:34 - Psychophysical harmony
22:11 - Religious language
27:05 - Religious epistemology
35:48 - God's knowledge
37:46 - Validity of the five ways
40:01 - Understanding God
42:20 - Ignosticism
48:04 - Continental philosophy of religion
53:02 - Fracturing of academia/education
57:45 - Fine-tuning
1:03:40 - Subjective bayesianism
1:06:46 - General model of inquiry
1:10:02 - Münchhausen trilemma
1:15:43 - Conclusion
