 Forgotten books and postwar Jewish identity In recent years, Americans have reckoned with a rise in antisemitism. Since the 2016 presidential election, antisemitism exploded online and entered the mainstream of American politics, with the 2018 shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue marking the deadliest attack on American Jews. But this is hardly the first season for grappling with domestic bigotry and racism. Eighty years ago, in the wake of World War II, Americans began addressing some of their own antisemitism and racism problems. They wondered how Americans could fight a war abroad against fascist enemies when they had so many of their own sins of bigotry to reckon with at home. Several popular books—fiction and non-fiction—addressed these issues during the 1940s but are mostly forgotten today. I discuss some of them in my new book, Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American. Laura Z. Hobson’s bestselling novel, Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) is the most famous of this group of popular 1940s anti-antisemitism novels; less than a year after publication, Agreement was made into an Academy Award-winning film starring Gregory Peck. But Hobson was not alone in thinking and writing fiction about American antisemitism. She was inspired by other successful women anti-antisemitism novelists. As Hobson wrote to her editor, Richard Simon, of the publishing house Simon and Schuster, “Maybe six other authors are right this minute finishing novels on the same subject—maybe not one will do much by itself, but perhaps all together those authors could become a kind of force for ending the complacency of uncomfortable or scared silence which defaults to the rantings of the bigots, who don’t practice that conspiracy of silence at all.” Several writers were, in fact, working on anti-antisemitism novels. Hobson’s writer-friend Margaret Halsey had published Some of My Best Friend Are Soldiers, a novel attacking racism and antisemitism. As Hobson wrote to Simon, she was also encouraged by the news of the Canadian novelist Gwethalyn Graham’s Earth and High Heaven (1944), a popular anti-antisemitism novel, being serialized in Collier’s magazine. And although Cleveland-based novelist Jo Sinclair (the pen name of Ruth Seid) was farther afield from Hobson’s New York literary circles, by 1946 it would be difficult for Hobson to miss the many New York Times references to Sinclair and her award-winning anti-antisemitism novel, Wasteland, published that year. Through different narrative strategies, these women writers made anti–antisemitism into a subject fitting for popular fiction. These novels also succeeded in making what had been considered a Jewish problem—something for Jewish communal leaders and defense organizations to worry over—into an American problem that required an American solution. But it was precisely this approach that made some reviewers critical of what Hobson and other anti-antisemitism novelists accomplished. They asked: where was the Jewishness in these novels? Why had novelists not provided readers with more of an understanding of the religious traditions, rituals, and joyous festivals at the heart of Jewish life? To some rabbis and Jewish writers who realized how little Americans understood about the distinctiveness of Judaism, it seemed to many like a wasted opportunity. Rabbis and other writers invested in Jewish religious life stepped in to fill the void. They seized the opportunity to present Judaism to a readership of Jews and non-Jews. In books with titles such as What Is a Jew? (1953); What the Jews Believe (1950); Basic Judaism (1947); Faith through Reason: A Modern Interpretation of Judaism (1946); and This is Judaism (1944), writers explained the basics of Judaism. In some ways, it is possible to see the anti-antisemitism genre as having paved the way to the “Introduction to Judaism” genre. These primers on Judaism were books and magazine articles that helped explain Jews and their religion to other Americans. In unexpected ways, increased concern over antisemitism led to greater understanding of what it meant to live a Jewish life. In the past 60 years, the anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s and the Introduction to Judaism books of the 1940s and 1950s have faded in popularity. These books and articles were very much of their moment. But they forged genres that proved lasting in American culture: anti-antisemitism remained a popular theme in late twentieth century film, with examples such as School Ties (1992) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989), and the Introduction to Judaism genre continued to flourish at this time, with popular examples written by Anita Diamant, Rabbis Irving Greenberg, Hayim Donin, and David Wolpe, as well as Sarah Hurwitz, Noah Feldman, and Rabbi Sharon Brous in more recent years. The ideas disseminated by these mid-twentieth century genres have also had a lasting impact on American culture. Americans continue to be outraged by antisemitic incidents in this country. There is still a huge discrepancy between the 1920s through early 1940s era, described in Postwar Stories, when antisemitism was much more accepted as part of the American Way—and the post-1940s reality, when antisemitism continued but lessened and was increasingly called out and interpreted as an affront to American values. As a result of the mid-twentieth century “religion moment” described in Postwar Stories, Americans continue to classify Jews as members of an American religion, despite the problems inherent in that categorization: we all know Jews who consider themselves proudly Jewish, but not religious. Today, we live in a culture that is very much a result of the ideas and attitudes these genres helped to inculcate. With increased antisemitism and questions about the meaning of Judaism during an era when Jewishness has become a more challenging identity, we may find Americans making their way back to these mid-twentieth century genres. Featured image credit: Dorothy McGuire, Gregory Peck & Sam Jaffe in a scene from the 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 Jonah and genre [long read] Reading a piece of writing—from instruction manual, to sports page, to Op-Ed piece—according to its genre is something we do so naturally that it seems odd to even talk about it. Indeed, the very phrase “reading according to genre” sounds odd itself, entirely too formal, perhaps suitable for some English or Comparative Literature class, but hardly something that normal people do when reading normal things on an everyday basis. While that is true, to some degree at least, the oddity of the phrasing only underscores the point that we read according to genre so automatically, so intuitively, that we typically don’t even know we are doing it in the first place. Consider the newspaper. No one expects an Op-Ed piece on the front page, nor a sports column in the classified section (ads, however, can evidently go anywhere!). Why not? Mostly because we know our way around a newspaper, and newspapers have, over the course of time, become structured in certain sorts of ways—with front pages, then pages devoted to sports, cartoons, classifieds, editorials, religion, advice, movies, etc.—all clearly marked and often on completely independent sections. A similar point obtains for letter writing. We know what kind of letter begins with the salutation “Dear Sir or Madam” and how it differs from a letter that begins “Dear Sweetie” or “Hey Joe.” We have been raised in the culture and its language and literature so that we have attained, through formal and informal education, a basic competency—not only in the spoken tongue (linguistic competence) but also in the literary forms (literary competence; see John Barton’s Reading the Old Testament). The same holds true even for newer developments in communication and social media. Emails, too, can begin with “Dear Professor” or “Hi Brent,” and that is enough to signal something of their tone and content. It is clear, too, that both of those emails are more formal than a text message that reads “where r u @? c u soon k?” As for those who prefer their newspapers online, distinct webpages usually keep distinct content…well, distinct. The present editorial, for instance, is not found on the same page as the scholarly entries on biblical figures, places, and the like. All of this makes good sense, but when we turn to ancient literature like the Bible, all bets are off. The Bible comes from a very different culture and was originally composed in languages other than contemporary English. We cannot read the Bible as if it were a piece of modern literature—that is, read it according to our own literary conventions. But just as a Hebrew or Aramaic letter (cf. Ezra 4:11–22; 5:6–17; 7:11–26) isn’t quite the same as an English business letter, the forms and genres of biblical literature aren’t the same as our own. There is overlap, to be sure, but there are also significant differences, even when there is overlap (Hebrew narrative, for example, tends to be more spare than contemporary English examples); and there are cases where there’s little or no overlap at all (prophetic lawsuits, for example, or apocalyptic literature like that found in Daniel 7–12 or Revelation). A real challenge, then, is coming to grips with the genres used in the Bible—becoming literarily competent in those forms so that we can read “with the grain” and aright, rather than erroneously and anachronistically (to put it rather too simply). Consider the book of Jonah. It is a short book that, despite its brevity, is remarkably well-known—mostly due to its “big fish” story. At the end of chapter 1, Jonah, who is a most reluctant prophet on the run from God’s call to preach to the dreaded Assyrians, is thrown overboard in the midst of a terrible storm at sea that is caused—so the story goes—by God precisely because of the prophet’s disobedience. As Jonah glugs into the deeps, God appoints a “large fish” to swallow him up. There Jonah lasts for three days, uttering a beautiful if rather ill-timed prayer (because it thanks God for a deliverance that hasn’t yet happened) in chapter 2, before the fish vomits him out—perhaps out of disgust, but evidently right on the road to Nineveh, where he finally takes up his task (though evidently still reluctantly) in chapters 3–4. This is a terribly brief summary of what is a remarkably beautiful and deceptively straightforward book, but it suffices to engage us in the key question: what genre is Jonah? The fish story has attracted a good bit of attention. “Jonah and the whale” almost serves as a cipher or CliffsNotes kind of summary for the book, despite the facts that (1) the book never calls the animal in question a whale but simply a “fish” or “big fish,” and (2) the fish episode is hardly what the book of Jonah is primarily about. Nevertheless, focus on “the whale” highlights the genre question because many people have stumbled over precisely this point. “No one could live in a whale [or ‘big fish’!], not even one day, let alone three!”—some people say, while some others might insist that, for whatever reason (usually a religious one), they see no problem with the story being “true” or “factual” or “literal.” The last-mentioned term is both instructive and problematic. “Literal,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is derived from Old French literal and, before that, Latin litterālis, both of which have to do with “letter.” So, the first main meaning in OED for “literal” is “[o]f or pertaining to letters of the alphabet; of the nature of letters, alphabetical.” From this first meaning, OED moves to the second main meaning: “Of a translation, version, transcript, etc.: Representing the very words of the original; verbally exact.” On first blush, this second meaning seems to approximate what some people seem to mean when they ask about the “literal truth” of the Bible or a story like Jonah or the “big fish story” in Jonah. However, note that the definition in OED has nothing to do with history or “facticity” per se; instead, the matter is entirely one of words and verbal exactness, not precision in terms of history or events. The third meaning of “literal” in OED, the one concerned with the use of the term in theological discourse, makes the same point: “Pertaining to the ‘letter’ (of Scripture); the distinctive epithet of that sense or interpretation (of a text) which is obtained by taking its words in their natural or customary meaning, and applying the ordinary rules of grammar; opposed to mystical, allegorical, etc.” The earliest attested instance of this meaning according to OED stems from 1382, in John Wycliffe’s introductory comment on the Bible (Prol. 43), that Holy Scripture has four understandings: “literal, allegorik, moral, and anagogik.” Interestingly enough, Wycliffe goes on to argue that the meanings that are most instructive for people of faith are the allegorical, moral, and anagogical (or heavenly), not the literal. This helps to explain OED’s further statements regarding this third meaning of “literal”: b. Hence, by extension, applied to the etymological or the relatively primary sense of a word, or to the sense expressed by the actual wording of a passage, as distinguished from any metaphorical or merely suggested meaning. [emphasis added] This can then be used to describe people: c. Of persons: Apt to take literally what is spoken figuratively or with humorous exaggeration or irony; prosaic, matter-of-fact or writings of various sorts: d. Of composition: Free from figures of speech, exaggeration, or allusion even in a negative sort of way: e. literal-minded adj. having a literal mind; characteristic of one who takes a matter-of-fact or unimaginative view of things. Hence literal-mindedness. To sum up to this point, reading “literally” is primarily about the words on the page; according to some people, “literal” readings are not the most instructive, even for readers who are interested in matters of belief or faith; in fact, “literal-minded” readers are apt to mistake or misinterpret some of the most important aspects of literature—the “literal” letters (or words) on the page themselves! Returning to Jonah now, the question is how do the letters and words on the page speak to the question of the book’s genre? This is a crucial question because we don’t want to mistake Jonah’s “sports page” for its “religion section” in a “literal-minded” sort of way. So, what genre is Jonah? What kind of literature is it? First, Jonah is a narrative—a story, comparable to other narrative sections of the Bible such as those found in Genesis or Judges. Second, it is a short story, comparable to other short stories also found in the Bible (e.g., Ruth, Esther, or the Joseph story in Genesis 37–50). Third, it is a prophetic short story, which is to say it is a story involving a prophet as the main character. One might compare the stories about Elijah and Elisha, perhaps, in 1 Kings 17–2 Kings 5 which are further examples of “prophetic literature” (see David L. Petersen’s The Prophetic Literature: An Introduction). None of this, however, speaks to Jonah’s overall force or tenor or purpose—that is, is the book of Jonah fiction or nonfiction? And what is its point? Here is where reading “according to genre” is tricky (see Steven L. McKenzie’s How to Read the Bible). As mentioned earlier, genre is so routinely learned and practiced by members of a culture that recognizing and interpreting genres is almost automatic if not subconscious. That is why we often read ancient genres as if they are modern ones—we are simply intuiting what they must be in light of our own cultural “genre-genes.” But this is also what makes reading ancient genres difficult—not only did the ancients have different genres that we don’t have, even those genres we share with the ancients often differed in antiquity (see above). Moreover, literature typically doesn’t broadcast its genre. It just is the genre it is, and competent readers know as much. When we don’t know a genre type or if we are unsure whether it is coterminous with our own examples—both of which are situations we regularly encounter when reading ancient literature—we must rely on clues to help us determine the genre. So what further “genre clues” do we get from Jonah? One is the highly artificial nature of the book, by which I mean the evidence that shows the book has been carefully constructed, especially around closely similar and repeating structures (see Phyllis Trible’s Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method, and the Book of Jonah for an extensive discussion; more briefly, you can see my essay “Jonah’s Sailors and Their Lot Casting: A Rhetorical-Critical Observation” in the journal Biblica, 2010). Jonah is no quickly jotted down eyewitness account of some event in the Iron Age; it is a carefully crafted work of literature—a literary artifice. McKenzie has argued that a number of clues in Jonah point to its genre and overall purpose as being one of satire. He highlights elements of humor, exaggeration, irony, even ridicule. For example, Jonah is more an “anti-prophet” than a prophet: he does anything and everything he can do to escape delivering God’s word to Nineveh. To cite different humorous elements: In 1:4, the ship is personified—it thinks about breaking up (NRSV: “threatened to break up”). Meanwhile, in the midst of this “perfect storm,” Jonah is napping! The sailors come off looking far more righteous than Jonah, as do the Ninevites later in the book. Another odd, if not humorous, element concerns the big fish: in 1:17 and 2:10 the fish that swallows Jonah is a masculine noun (Hebrew dāg), but in 2:1 it is a feminine noun (dāgāh)! It is highly unlikely that Jonah’s “whale” was some sort of reef fish, like the clownfish or parrotfish, that can change gender, nor would ancient Israelites have known of hermaphroditic fish. The switch could be some sort of scribal error in the textual tradition, but according to McKenzie, it may be a genre clue as well. More could be said in support of McKenzie’s interpretation of Jonah as satire. Regardless, there are other good reasons not to read Jonah as a straightforward historical narrative. Key historical details are left out of the story, there are chronological problems in fixing the prophet and the city of Nineveh as described in the story into the history of Assyria as we now know it, and there are even geographical problems with several of the details (e.g., Jonah going to Joppa rather than Tyre, the vast size of Nineveh, and so on). The end result of these considerations, according to McKenzie, is that Jonah is not “history but satire or parody, a ridiculous story that makes a serious point” (p. 13). To read Jonah as history is to mis-read according to genre—to mistake its real genre and therefore to “misconstrue its primary message” (p. 2), which for McKenzie has to do with the stupidity of prejudice, hatred, arrogance, and bigotry toward others (in this case, the Assyrians). That is a serious message indeed, far more significant and relevant than debating whether or not it is possible to survive under sea for three days prior to the invention of submarines. Whether or not the latter could happen is quite another question—perhaps a live question for some people—but it is not a question that the book of Jonah is primarily interested in answering. To reduce the book of Jonah to that kind of scientific (or historical) question is to make a serious category error: an error of genre, a mistake of misreading. It is to be “literal-minded” in the worst way, taking “literally what is spoken figuratively or with humorous exaggeration or irony” or adopting “a matter-of-fact or unimaginative view of things” (OED). It may also be an attempt to evade or escape (like Jonah!) from what may be the primary point of the book since bigotry, prejudice, and hatred are very real, very live problems in our time, no less than in antiquity. Finally, Jonah’s “lessons” on these topics are as real via satire as they are via science—more real, in fact. As the Roman poet Horace said about satires long ago: “What are you laughing at? Change the name and you are the subject of the story” (Satires 1.1.69–70). Featured image credit: “Jonah and the Whale”, Folio from a Jami al-Tavarikh (Compendium of Chronicles). Public domain via The Metropolitan Museum of Art. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 Conversations with Dostoevsky The first time I visited St Petersburg, nearly thirty years ago, I stayed not far from the area in which Dostoevsky set the action of Crime and Punishment. The tenement blocks were, for the most part, those that Dostoevsky himself would have seen—indeed, one friend lived at Grazhdanskaya 19, a possible location for the coffin-like garret inhabited by Raskolnikov, the novel’s homicidal anti-hero. The area borders the Griboedov canal, along which Raskolnikov frequently walked and where the house in which he murdered the miserly old pawnbroker and her innocent sister is situated—I could even imagine that the dark figure emerging from the dingy entrance was the pawnbroker herself. Further away was the Haymarket, still crowded with gypsies, peddlers, beggars, and cheap food stalls, and—despite the old Church of the Assumption having been pulled down by the Soviet authorities to make way for a Metro station—still an atmosphere heavy with poverty and the crimes of poverty. During those long walks, it was easy to feel that ghosts of Dostoevsky’s city lingered on in the mostly unvisited and run-down streets of the late twentieth century. There wasn’t so much traffic back then, and in the late afternoon sun, with only the distant shouts of some unseen workmen breaking the silence, there was a sense of timelessness, as if this is what it had always been like. Sheer imagination, of course—and much more important is what Crime and Punishment and Dostoevsky’s other great novels (Notes from Underground, The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov, and more) can mean for us today. We live in a material and social world very different from that of Dostoevsky’s characters but, like them, we still have to struggle with the challenges of finding a place in a competitive society that is endlessly generating economic insecurity, social injustice, family breakdown, and the fragmentation of religion and other value systems—as well, of course, as the eternal questions as to who and how to love, and whether, in the end, there is a God who cares. The historical study of Dostoevsky addresses these questions by taking us back to Dostoevsky’s world—less to the canal-side streets and back-alleys of St Petersburg and more to the literary and intellectual culture of his time, placing him in the context of contemporary debates about literature, politics, faith, and, not least, the future of Russia itself. Historical scholarship goes a long way towards reconstructing Dostoevsky’s world and showing the detail of his involvement in contemporary issues of art and society and his approach to fundamental questions about the ultimate purpose of human life—and what a lot of detail there is! Even apart from the dramatic events of his mock execution, his imprisonment and exile in Siberia, his gambling addiction and often chaotic love life, Dostoevsky was extraordinarily active in the literary world of his time, editing a succession of journals that published both Russian and foreign literature, from Mrs Gaskell to Edgar Allan Poe (he admired both). He was interested in philosophy and at one point planned on translating Hegel, while Russian identity and the fate of Russia in the modern world elicited some of his most intemperate and controversial statements—and, of course, there was God! As Dostoevsky himself put it, the question of belief plunged him into a ‘crucible of doubt’ as he confronted the seemingly irresolvable clash between the Christian God of love and the reality of a world scarred by poverty, injustice, gratuitous cruelty, violence against women, child abuse, and much more—all addressed in his novels. Historical study is one way of exploring these questions, but Conversations with Dostoevsky attempts the opposite approach. Instead of going back to Dostoevsky’s world, the Conversations bring Dostoevsky into ours, specifically into a series of conversations with a mid-career academic going through a rather average mid-life crisis—‘average’, that is, until, while he is reading one of Dostoevsky’s short stories, the writer himself appears. Thus begins a series of conversations that cover many of the themes of Dostoevsky’s fiction and non-fiction, focussing especially on the ‘eternal questions’ of God and that mysterious creature we call the human being. History cannot be ignored, of course, and the Conversations are accompanied by a set of commentaries that explore the issues raised in a more conventional manner. Nevertheless, a fictionalizing approach can help to profile the existential questions at issue in his work and to help us reflect on how we, as readers, bring our own concerns and—inevitably—biases into what we read. In the century and a half since his death, Dostoevsky has been read in many ways—as a prophet of the Russian Revolution, as a spokesman for protest atheism, or as representative of Orthodoxy Christianity, and more. Today, his work is necessarily exposed to the critical rereading of the Russian literary and intellectual tradition provoked by the invasion of Ukraine that is taking place across Russian Studies. More than ever before, it is important to be conscious not just of what Dostoevsky wrote but of how we are reading him. Featured image credit: Portrait of Fedor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 Does doctrine have a future in Christianity? Why did Christianity develop doctrines in the first four centuries of its existence? After all, no other religion or worldview of late classical antiquity felt the need to do this. A school of philosophy might focus on propagating the teachings of its founders, yet Christianity seemed more concerned with clarifying the identity of Jesus Christ, before affirming his moral and spiritual vision. And what about the contemporary significance of these doctrines? Since these emerged in the culture of late classical antiquity, can they be disregarded today? These questions have fascinated me since I began studying theology at Oxford in the 1970s. I was a late arrival in this field, having initially studied chemistry and earned my doctorate in Oxford’s Department of Biochemistry under the supervision of Professor Sir George Radda. I could not help but wonder whether there might be some interesting parallels between the development of scientific theories on the one hand, and Christian doctrine on the other. Reflecting on these questions took me the best part of fifty years. In The Nature of Christian Doctrine, I present a constructive and innovative account of the origins, development, and enduring significance of Christian doctrine, explaining why it remains essential to the life of Christian communities. My original hunch that there might be some significant commonalities between the development of scientific theories and Christian doctrine is more plausible today than it was back in the 1970s. Since 2010, an increasing number of scholars of early Christian thought have explored the idea of early Christianity as a “theological laboratory,” which proposed and assessed various ways of conceptualizing its vision of reality. I suggest that doctrinal formulations are best seen as proposals submitted for testing across the Christian world, rather than as static accounts of orthodoxy. This approach aligns with the available evidence much better than Walter Bauer’s famous theory of suppressed early orthodoxies. I argue that we can use Thomas Kuhn’s concept of a “paradigm shift” as a lens for understanding early Christian doctrinal development. Existing modes of thinking are found to be inadequate in explaining a diverse array of observations, leading to a “tipping point” in which new frameworks of interpretation are needed. There is an interesting parallel here with Christ’s remark that old wineskins are incapable of containing new wine. Furthermore, early Christian writers, such as Athanasius of Alexandria, seem to have employed something very similar to the modern scientific notion of “inference to the best explanation” in developing their accounts of the identity and significance of Christ. While these may be the most original and interesting aspects of this volume, I also explore many other facets of Christian doctrines. I provide a robust critique of George Lindbeck’s still-influential Nature of Doctrine (1984), raising significant concerns about his crude reduction of doctrine to a single function. I point out that there are multiple functions of doctrine that we need to weave together into a cohesive whole, rather than limiting ourselves to a single preferred option. Drawing on the philosopher Mary Midgley’s concept of “mapping” as a means of coordinating the multiple aspects of complex phenomena, and Karl Popper’s “three worlds” theory, I explore how the theoretical, objective, and subjective aspects of doctrine can be seen as essential and interconnected. Christian doctrine both allows us to grasp the deep structures of reality, while at the same time creating a coordinating framework that ensures its various aspects are perceived as interconnected parts of a greater whole. Doctrine provides a framework that allows theological reality to be seen and experienced in a new manner. So what difference does doctrine make? Why not simply embrace Christianity’s moral and spiritual vision and consider its doctrinal aspects as optional? I explore this question by considering some important connections between Christian doctrine and the Platonic idea of theoria—a new way of perceiving reality that encourages participation rather than mere observation. Doctrines provide a framework that alters our perception and experience of reality, influencing how we feel about the world and ourselves. Although many older accounts of Christian doctrine treat it somewhat rationalistically, I emphasize its imaginative and affective dimensions. It is not simply something that we understand; it is something that gives us a new vision of reality. So does doctrine have a future? If the arguments presented in this book hold any merit, doctrine is crucial to the future of Christianity. It safeguards the core vision of reality that is essential for the proper functioning and future flourishing of Christian communities. It articulates the life-giving and life-changing realities that lie at the heart of the Christian community of faith. If Christianity has a future, then doctrine will be an important part of that future. In fact, I think the evidence allows me to go further: if Christianity has a future, it is because of doctrine. Featured image credit: First Council of Nicaea (Damaskinos). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 Beyond God and atheism What are we doing here? What’s the point of existence? Traditionally, the West has been dominated by two very different answers to these big questions. On the one hand, there is belief in the traditional God of the Abrahamic faiths, a supreme being who created the universe for a good purpose. On the other hand, there is the meaningless, purposeless universe of secular atheism. However, I’ve come to think both views are inadequate, as both have things they can’t explain about reality. In my view, the evidence we currently have points to the universe having purpose but one that exists in the absence of the traditional God. The theistic worldview struggles to explain suffering, particularly in the natural world. Why would a loving, all-powerful God choose to create the North American long-tailed shrew that paralyses its prey and then slowly eats it alive over several days before it dies from its wounds? Theologians have tried to argue that there are certain good things that exist in our world that couldn’t exist in a world with less suffering, such as serious moral choices, or opportunities to show courage or compassion. But even if that’s right, it’s not clear that our creator has the right to kill and maim—by choosing to create hurricanes and disease, for example—in order, say, to provide the opportunity to show courage. A classic objection to crude forms of utilitarianism considers the possibility of a doctor who has the option of kidnapping and killing one healthy patient in order to save the lives of five other patients: giving the heart to one, the kidneys to another, and so on. Perhaps this doctor could increase the amount of well-being in the world through this action: saving five lives at the cost of one. Even so, many feel that the doctor doesn’t have the right to take the life of the healthy person, even for a good purpose. Likewise, I think it would be wrong for a cosmic creator to infringe on the right to life and security of so many by creating earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural disasters. Looking at the other side of the coin, the secular atheist belief in a meaningless, purposeless universe struggles to explain the fine-tuning of physics for life. This is the recent discovery that for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to fall in a certain, very narrow range. If the strength of dark energy—the force that powers the expansion of the universe—had been a little bit stronger, no two particles would have ever met, meaning no stars, no planets, no structural complexity at all. If, on the other hand, it had been significantly weaker, it would not have counteracted gravity, and the universe would have collapsed back on itself a split second after the big bang. For life to be possible, the strength of dark energy had to be—like Goldilocks’ porridge—just right. For a long time, I thought the multiverse was the best explanation of the fine-tuning of physics for life. If enough people play the lottery, it becomes likely that someone’s going to get the right numbers to win. Likewise, if there are enough universes, with enough variety in the numbers in their ‘local physics,’ then statistically it becomes highly probable that one of them is going to fluke the right numbers for life to exist. However, I have been persuaded by philosophers of probability that the attempt to explain fine-tuning in terms of a multiverse violates a very important principle in probabilistic reasoning, known as the “Total Evidence Requirement.” This is the principle that you should always work with the most specific evidence you have. If the prosecution tells the jury that Jack always carries a knife around with him, when they know full well that he always carries a butter knife around with him, then they have misled to jury—not by lying, but by giving them less specific evidence than is available. The multiverse theorist violates this principle by working with the evidence that a universe is fine-tuned, rather than the more specific evidence we have available, namely that this universe is fine-tuned. According to the standard account of the multiverse, the numbers in our physics were determined by probabilistic processes very early in its existence. These probabilistic processes make it highly unlikely that any particular universe will be fine-tuned, even though if there are enough universes one of them will probably end up fine-tuned. However, we are obliged by the Total Evidence Requirement to work with the evidence that this universe in particular is fine-tuned, and the multiverse theory fails to explain this data. This is all a bit abstract, so let’s take a concrete example. Suppose you walk into a forest and happen upon a monkey typing in perfect English. This needs explaining. Maybe it’s a trained monkey. Maybe it’s a robot. Maybe you’re hallucinating. What would not explain the data is postulating millions of other monkeys on other planets elsewhere in the universe, who are mostly typing nonsense. Why not? Because, in line with the Requirement of Total Evidence, your evidence is not that some monkey is typing English but that this monkey is typing in English. In my view, we face a stark choice. Either it is an incredible fluke that these numbers in our physics are just right for life, or these numbers are as they are because they are the right numbers for life, in other words, that there is some kind of “cosmic purpose” or goal-directedness towards life at the fundamental level of reality. The former option is too improbable to take seriously. The only rational option remaining is to embrace cosmic purpose. Theism cannot explain suffering. Atheism cannot explain fine-tuning. Only cosmic purpose in the absence of God can accommodate both of these data-points. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
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