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Does Molinism explain the demographics of theism?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 November 2008

STEPHEN MAITZEN
STEPHEN MAITZEN
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia B4P 2R6, Canada
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Abstract

I reply to Jason Marsh's discussion of my article ‘Divine hiddenness and the demographics of theism’. For several reasons, Marsh's inventive Molinist explanation of the lopsided worldwide distribution of theistic believers does not threaten the conclusion I argued for originally: theistic explanations of that distribution are implausible on even their own terms and in any case less plausible than naturalistic ones.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , December 2008 , pp. 473 - 477
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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References

Notes

1.  Jason Marsh ‘Do the demographics of theistic belief disconfirm theism? A reply to Maitzen’, Religious Studies, 44 (2008), 465–471. All in-text references are to this paper.

2.  Stephen Maitzen ‘Divine hiddenness and the demographics of theism’, Religious Studies, 42 (2006), 177–191.

3.  For present purposes, I'll follow Marsh in his traditional use of masculine pronouns to refer to God, and this journal in capitalizing them.

4.  Marsh emphasizes that his explanation ‘does not mean that everyone who currently resides in non-theistic regions belongs to this [stubborn] group, for not everyone in non-theistic regions lacks genuine opportunity to believe in God’ (467). Granting that point, there is nevertheless enough uniformity within various theistic and non-theistic cultures for us to conclude that millions of people who reside in non-theistic regions have quite similar opportunity or lack of opportunity to believe in God.

5.  See Alvin Plantinga The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), for a defence of this idea.

6.  In Marsh's terminology, individuals with stubborn essences exemplify ‘trans-circumstantial unwillingness to accept God's love in their natural lives’.

7.  Plantinga The Nature of Necessity, 186.

8.  See, e.g., Carl Sagan The Demon-Haunted World: Science as Candle in the Dark (New York NY: Ballantine Books, 1996), and Michael Shermer Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (New York NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2002).

9.  ‘Hypothesis of indifference’ is Paul Draper's label for a very similar claim. See his ‘Pleasure and pain: an evidential problem for theists’, NoÛs, 23 (1989), 331–350, 332.

10.  I thank Andrew Graham for helpful comments.