Maitzen, Stephen

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Review of Paul K. Moser’s The Elusive God:Reorienting Religious EpistemologyNew York: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 292 + xi pp.,ISBN 978-0-521-88903-2, hb.Stephen MaitzenPublished online: 17 November 2009# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009Years ago my grandmother indulged in what its practitioners call ‘automaticwriting.’ She would grip a pen, poise it over a piece of paper, and wait quietly.Her grip was supposed to be light enough that the spirits of deceased relativescould move the pen and thereby write messages, including replies to questions. Ifound this hobby of hers disturbing but fascinating, so I probed it. I had her askthe spirits questions whose answers only those unbound by the laws of physicscould immediately discover: ‘What did I write on the piece of paper I’m hiding?’and the like. The answers the spirits sent her were of course quite wrong and nobetter than her own guesses. My grandmother offered predictable excuses: thespirits concern themselves with spiritual affairs rather than mundane ones, theydon’t like being tested, they don’t do parlor tricks, and they don’t waste theirtime trying to convince skeptics like me. If I expected to get straight answers,she scolded, I’d need to leave behind my prideful skepticism, ask the right kindof questions, and approach the spirits with trust and humility.In The Elusive God, Paul Moser takes my grandmother’s attitude and applies itto skepticism about God. Religious skeptics, he says, should stop expecting God toprovide what Moser calls ‘spectator evidence’ (2) of God’s existence and shouldexpect, instead, only ‘absolutely perfectly authoritative evidence’ of ‘a divineauthoritative call to volitional fellowship whereby one allows one’s volitionalattitudes to be conformed to divine perfect love’ (10). I can hear Grandma now:‘The spirits want to guide you, not convince you that they exist, and if you don’twant their guidance, too bad for you.’ Moser dresses it up in verbose, preachy, andSOPHIA (2010) 49:149–151DOI 10.1007/s11841-009-0149-9S. Maitzen (*)Department of Philosophy, Acadia University, Wolfville, NS, Canadae-mail: smaitzen@acadiau.carepetitious prose, but it’s just what the medium says when the skeptic at the table isspoiling the séance, and it’s no more cogent.Despite the importance he assigns to the notion of ‘absolutely perfectlyauthoritative evidence’ of the existence of ‘the authoritatively convicting andtransformingly loving God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus’ (83), and despitethe pages he spends repeating versions of the definition I quoted earlier, Moser tellsus disappointingly little about how to detect such evidence. He suggests in variousplaces that encountering such evidence involves a pang of conscience that revealsone’s moral and cognitive deficiency before God. But how does a pang ofconscience imply all the content in Moser’s detailed Christian formulations? Does itfeel any different from the pang of conscience a Buddhist might experience as thetug of karma? We’re never told.Moser’s derision of ‘spectator evidence’ is disingenuous. In trying to convincethe reader, he has no choice but to rely on spectator evidence himself, ‘evidenceof God’s reality [that meets] our preferred standards of evidence’ (38). For whatother standards of evidence could we apply at a given time but our preferredstandards? He writes as if somehow he’s using God’s standards of evidence ratherthan his own. In the book’s only argument for God’s existence, Moser unabashedlyoffers spectator evidence: the transformation some people seem to undergo whenthey get religion and thereby ‘a new volitional center with a default position ofunselfish love and forgiveness toward all people and of hope in the ultimatetriumph of good over evil by [God]’ (135). Moser cites himself as an example(135) but unfortunately doesn’t elaborate on the example. Because spiritualtransformation is the only theistic evidence the book offers, one would expectdetails about Moser’s own transformation or, better yet, large-scale data about thetransformative effect of religious conversions, along with reasons why theisticexplanations of those data are better than naturalistic, social-psychological ones.But we get neither.Moser also applies a double standard. He repeatedly scolds religious skepticsfor what he sees as their epistemic arrogance on the topic of God’s nature,purposes, and methods. But he allows himself dozens of pages of highlyconfident (if highly repetitious) claims about precisely what God wants andwould demand, he corrects ‘various biblical writers’ who he says havemisrepresented God’s character (87), and he briskly rejects theological viewsheld by Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Edwards, and Kierkegaard. In justone of many more examples, he claims that God’s call to us ‘would be respectfulof human agency and thus rejectable and not coercive’ (105). But who says oursovereign creator is obliged to respect the agency of us degenerate sinners? Whyisn’t this demand just as presumptuous as the skeptic’s demand for evidencemeeting ‘our preferred standards’?The book’s theistic explanations of ‘divine hiding’ share the defect of all suchexplanations in the literature: they don’t explain why God hides from some entirecultures much more drastically than from others. As Moser himself says, ‘Aperfectly loving God would communicate on a frequency available to all people whoare open to divine rescue on God’s terms [and] ... would seek all-inclusivecommunity under the umbrella of divine unselfish love’ (116, emphases in original).Yet he says nothing about why, for instance, God lets the Afghans (virtually all of150 S. Maitzenwhom are monotheists) pick up his frequency so much better than the Thais(virtually none of whom are). God may hide, as Moser says, in order to ‘teachpeople to yearn for’ God, ‘strengthen grateful trust in God,’ ‘remove humancomplacency toward God,’ ‘shatter destructively prideful human self-reliance,’and ‘prevent people who aren’t ready for fellowship with God from explicitlyrejecting God’ (107). But none of those reasons would account for God’s hidingfrom the populace of entire countries while those lucky enough to inhabit othercountries get the benefits and opportunities God offers to those who worshiphim.1In the short space allotted me, it’s hard to convey how bad this book is. It is,however, quite handsomely produced. If only Cambridge had taken as much care invetting the book as in typesetting it.ReferencesMaitzen, S. (2006). Divine hiddenness and the demographics of theism. Religious Studies, 42, 177–191.Maitzen, S. (2008). Does Molinism explain the demographics of theism? Religious Studies, 44, 473–477.1 For more on this unsolved problem, see Maitzen (2006, 2008)Review of Paul K. Moser’s The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology 151

Review of Paul K. Moser’s The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology: New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 292 + xi pp., ISBN 978-0-521-88903-2, hb

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Review of Paul K. Moser’s The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology: New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 292 + xi pp., ISBN 978-0-521-88903-2, hb

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