Month: November 2025

Bad writing in philosophy of religion

It’s not exactly a hot take to say that academic standards in philosophy of religion are quite poor, at least by comparison with other areas of academia, and to other areas of philosophy more generally. Sometimes it is just bad arguments, or bad research practices, etc. But there is one type of issue I see quite a lot, which is just straight up bad writing. Even calling it ‘bad writing’ fails to quite capture what I mean. Indeed, one of the difficulties I want to bring out is how traditional methods of philosophical analysis are not really appropriate to police this, and I’m finding it hard to even describe the issue properly.

An example – Tim Stratton

So let’s look at an example. It’s not an example I’ve picked because it is particularly important, or that it shows some great philosophical mistake. In a sense it’s quite trivial. But that’s how these sorts of bad writing fall through the academic cracks. Academics are not trained to find and remedy this sort of thing, so me bringing it up will seem weird. But hear me out.

A few years ago, I debated Tim Stratton on the Unbelievable show. Following that, he wrote a blog post about the exchange. I’m not going to examine his arguments there in this post. Instead, I just want to highlight one example of bad writing on his part, because it’s the sort of thing I see a lot. His idea is that if determinism is true, then our beliefs are caused by external forces beyond our control, and hence we shouldn’t trust them. In explaining this point, he says the following:

…as Joshua Rasmussen would say, ‘mindless stuff’ that knows nothing about metaphysics.

All I want to point out is how strange it is to quote Rasmussen simply saying “mindless stuff”. Why is this strange? Well, it’s hard to provide a completely watertight explanation, but let’s have a go.

Firstly, it’s not a distinctive phrase that Rasmussen is known for. It’s just two words, so it hardly communicates a distinct idea that Rasmussen has introduced into the philosophical lexicon. It’s not a new term of art that is associated with Rasmussen, in the way that “language game” is associated with Wittgenstein, or “will to power” is with Nietzsche, etc. It’s just the sort of phrase I would imagine I could find in any book covering this sort of topic. Just as one example off the top of my head, on page 210 of God’s Undertaker (2009), John Lennox says:

“Either human intelligence ultimately owes its origin to mindless matter; or there is a Creator.”

‘Mindless matter’ and ‘mindless stuff’ are basically the same exact idea, showing that Rasmussen isn’t introducing anything new here. You could probably find an example of me saying the two-word phrase “mindless stuff” or some synonym for it online if you looked for it. So the problem is that it is a quote, in the sense that Rasmussen did say that, but it is weird to use it as a quote because it’s not a distinctive phrase at all. It’s like saying “as Trump would say ‘the'”. Yes, I’m sure Trump has used the word ‘the’ on countless recorded occasions, so in a sense you could quote him saying it, but it would be a very strange thing to do. It’s not a fallacy, nor is it some other kind of philosophical mistake. It’s just bad writing.

Secondly, there is something oddly self referential about how this is all presented. If you look at the full context of the quote I presented above, you will see that in the blog post Stratton is actually quoting himself in the debate quoting Rasmussen:

As I pointed out in the debate, this means that all of a person’s metaphysical beliefs are determined by “consciousness-lacking, intelligence-lacking, wisdom-lacking, reason-lacking, morality-lacking, and, as Joshua Rasmussen would say, ‘mindless stuff’ that knows nothing about metaphysics.”

So I’m quoting Stratton, who is quoting Stratton, who is quoting Rasmussen. And at the end of this chain of Russian dolls, all we get to is a non-distinct two word phrase.

Though disappointing to get to, it may just about qualify as a quote in a technical sense; after all, Rasmussen did say those words. But it’s not really a citation as such. That’s because he doesn’t provide the location of the original where it comes from. He could have just said that it’s from Rasmussen’s 2023 book Who are you, really? and provided the page reference. Of course, this is just a blog post I guess. He could just give the quote without the ability for readers to see the source. But, Rasmussen’s name is a hyperlink in the sentence in which Stratton quotes him, so there is something like a citation there. But it isn’t a link to Rasmussen’s book on Amazon, or something like that. It’s link back to a video of Stratton reviewing the book.

So in the blog post he quotes himself talking in the debate, in which he quoted Rasmussen, and he provides a link which also references himself talking about Rasmussen. This isn’t normal.

Conclusion

My diagnosis of what Stratton is doing is that he peppers quotes from people like Rasmussen in his work not because he is using them to make wider points or connections to surrounding literature. It’s just there to make what he is saying sound more authoritative. Knowing that Rasmussen used the phrase ‘mindless stuff’ doesn’t shed any light onto anything Stratton was saying. He isn’t arguing for anything distinctive that Rasmussen says. It’s just a name-drop for the sake of it.

He doesn’t provide any real citation for the reference, and it is tempting to think that this is because there’s nothing to see if you were to go and look up the source. It would be like going to find the video of that Trump speech to check if he did say the word ‘the’ at some point. So instead of a proper citation, he uses the veneer of a citation to promote his own YouTube channel. Academics do cite their own work, but they should do so only when it is relevant. Otherwise it looks commercial.

Part of the problem is that this sort of writing violates norms of academic practice that are not written down, and not explicitly taught to academics. We are not trained to fight these sorts of battles. It’s like being trained to operate a telescope that’s used to focus on things very far away, and then someone making you use it to try to find their keys they dropped on the floor right in front of you. The tools of academic analysis are not well-suited to the job. And my worry is that this sort of bad writing hides multiple terrible research practices and poor reasoning, but that it is slipping in under the radar nonetheless. This is part of the problem with the philosophy of religion. Actual people produce stuff that’s the academic equivalent of AI slop. It sort of looks just like the genuine article when you first see it, but the more you look at it the weirder it starts to seem.

Parochialism in metaphysics

Here is an underdeveloped thought:

Humility) Whatever the ultimate nature of everything is at the deepest possible level (if that even makes sense), it’s probably not what you were thinking. You are probably wrong.

Ok, as a statement of intellectual humility, it’s not that interesting I guess. But let’s push it a little bit further.

It’s a simple anthropological observation that people tend to project ideas onto this existential canvas that are ‘parochial’. That is, people tend to project things about their local experience and blow them up to metaphysical importance. A classic example of this would be how typical it is in times of war for religious authorities to assure the army that God is on their side, or even that the war itself will decide something of cosmic significance. What this is doing is saying that God, the deepest metaphysical explanation for absolutely everything there is, is interested in how you do on a particular day in a fight.

Here is another example. Maybe you think that the deepest level of reality happens to be mental (maybe you think God is a mind, or maybe you are an idealist, etc). Assuming you take yourself to (at least partly) be a mind, this means you are saying that the deepest level of reality happens to be just like you.

Here’s another example. Suppose you are not a nihilist about value, but you think (as many atheists do), that values are all in the head, specifically in the heads of humans. This again puts us at the centre of things, assuming that there’s no more to value than how it relates to us. This is (perhaps) another form of parochialism.

What’s the significance of this? Well, what it does (I think) is establish a mild sort of epistemic tilt away from such ideas. Sure, maybe the deepest level of reality happens to care a lot about how your tribe does in a given conflict, but it seems quite unlikely. After all, there are limitless possibilities. Maybe there is nobody out there at all (atheism), or maybe there is a god but he doesn’t care about humans at all, or maybe something I can’t even begin to imagine. It’s impossible to quantify. But it starts to seem like a coincidence if it happened to be parochial.

Perhaps the best way to think about it is like Hume’s argument about miracles. I can think of lots of parochial (human-centred) reasons why people might claim that, for instance, god is on our side in a battle. Maybe it makes me feel more confident. Maybe it makes me more prepared to kill my fellow man if I feel I have cosmic permission, etc. But those sorts of considerations are patently not truth tracking. How many times in history did the priestly caste announce before a battle that after doing rigorous checking that god actually was on the other side? I’m guessing not often. And that goes for both sides of every battle.

So we have reason to think that people have a tendency to project parochial things, and that this tendency isn’t epistemically well grounded. This mirrors Hume’s observation that people have many diverse reasons for claiming to have witnessed miracles, including simply lying or otherwise being mistaken. And that this tilts our expectations away from their claims. We have a starting point of scepticism towards them.

The tilt that parochialism induces could be overcome. It’s not decisive. Just because people tend to project a protective all powerful backer when they go off to war doesn’t mean that on this occasion right now that he isn’t on our side. But what it does is mean it’s reasonable to raise an eyebrow if that’s what you are being told on the eve of war. ‘Of course that’s what they are saying. That’s what they always say,’ etc.

As I said at the start, this is an underdeveloped thought. But it rings true with me. One of the reasons I don’t believe in Christianity, or anything like that, is that it seems to be exactly the sort of thing I would expect people to project. It’s parochial. Of course you want there to be a super powerful protector out there that agrees with your specific political and social views and has your interests at heart. Who wouldn’t want that? But we shouldn’t promote that above other, less psychologically appealing, or just less familiar sounding, possibilities.

Here is just one very sketchy application of the idea. Take the fine tuning argument. As Standardly presented, it argues that the fine tuning of the constants of nature strongly favours theism over atheism. Seeing this through the lens of my parochial analysis, I want to say that the right conclusion is that the evidence strongly favours ‘non-randomness’ about those constants over ‘randomness’. Something is making the constants take those values, rather than it just being pure chance. But that leaves open so many possibilities. A benevolent god is one of them. But so is a god who is interested in something other than us. Maybe we are an otherwise uninteresting side product of this universe, which is actually fine tuned for some other reason. Maybe there is some naturalistic disposition (for lack of a better word) that is the reason they take those values. Maybe it’s something non-random that I can’t imagine.

it’s only unchecked (rampant!) parochialism that would lead you to think that the FTA is an argument for anything like us, or like the sort of thing we tend to project for social or psychological (etc) reasons.

So this parochial analysis is a fruitful new lens to revisit some familiar territory through.

I’m still thinking it all through, so feel free to tell me if I’m being thick somehow. I usually am.