The Page 99 Test: J. L. Schellenberg's "What God Would Have Known"

J. L. Schellenberg is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie University.

He is the author of ten books and 70 published articles. His first book, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, introduced a new argument against theism that remains the subject of much discussion. Also influential is a trilogy from Cornell and several subsequent volumes on a sceptical form of religion compatible with the denial of theism. These latter ideas are placed into an evolutionary context and made generally accessible in a short work from Oxford called Evolutionary Religion.

Schellenberg applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, What God Would Have Known: How Human Intellectual and Moral Development Undermines Christian Doctrine, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book gives part of my argument for supposing that what I call “the Big Narrative” – the story embedded in the Bible of God’s dealings with human beings across many centuries – is false. Here is close to 99% of what appears on that page:
Why should we not endorse [the Big Narrative]? Suppose we ignore the somewhat unsavoury part about God’s jealousness with regard to worship, focusing on social injustice when considering what according to the story has gone wrong, and set aside the fact that doing good for its own sake rather than for reward or to avoid punishment appears to be insufficiently emphasized. Even so, two major points cry out for attention.

First, notice how instead of social and psychological complexity, the gift of biological and cultural evolution subtly intertwined, we have an oversimple portrayal of ‘good guys and bad guys.’ On one side are the righteous, on the other the wicked, easily identified and distinguished, with the wicked quite able to be righteous instead if only they tried or, if regarded as incorrigible, entirely to blame for being in this condition. An analogy comes from the movies: think of 1950s Westerns. Even if today’s movies involving crime and bad behaviour are themselves criticizable in many ways, they do convey the complexity of human motives and social interactions more faithfully than did most of those Westerns. Likewise, what we have learned from various religious and philosophical traditions and from science about the subtleties of human nature and its relation to other wider facts has shown the shortcomings of the repeated raw contrasts in the Big Narrative between good and evil. There is no room here for sincerely held alternative religious beliefs or the cultural factors that might have produced them, for mixed motives, for the influence on behaviour of unconscious factors or of abuse in childhood, for addiction, for poor mental health and disorders such as sociopathy, for systemic factors traceable to the advent of agriculture and stratified societies, or, in the background, for biological evolution.

Second, there is the mistaken assumption, on the part of anyone who acquiesces in the Big Narrative, that even their creator, who knows all the relevant causal factors and lovingly numbers all the hairs on their heads, will justly respond to the bad behaviour of the ‘wicked’ with violent punishment and, in the end, complete destruction. God, in other words, is seen as exhibiting and sanctioning behaviour we have learned signals emotional or moral immaturity as well as a poor success rate when it comes to improving behaviour and contributing to long-term human flourishing (here it is worth contemplating why we see less today in the way of corporal punishment and more in the way of prison reform). Would an unsurpassably great personal being suffer from such immaturity?
So would someone who turns to page 99 in my book, reading what you’ve just read, get a good idea of what the whole work is about? Well, it would be nice to be able to ask you what you think it’s about after reading this excerpt. Since I can’t do that, let me guess – and I’ll include the assumption that you know and have thought about the work’s title and subtitle and have figured out that “the Big Narrative” refers to biblical content. Putting 2 and 2 together, I imagine you may hit on the thought that, given what goes into the concept of God, including omniscience, any God there may be would have to have known way back then, when the Big Narrative was formed, all manner of things that intellectual and moral development have made clear to us only much more recently. Probably you’ll also pick up on the fact that I think this is some kind of problem for the Big Narrative, and by extension for the religious views that require it to be true.

If you got this much from the Page 99 Test, you would grasp a central idea of the book, but you would still be mostly in the dark about how I develop and apply it in the book. You would see that, unlike many other critics of classical Christian doctrine, I take human cultural progress to reveal how much God (if there were a God) would have known way back when rather than revealing an ignorant and obtuse deity – a quite contemptible figure, in the view of Richard Dawkins. The key is not to let what the biblical writers say about God determine what goes into our idea of God. If God is by definition omniscient then God would have to know everything we know! But the Page 99 Test will leave you wondering why I think this matters, in relation to the truth of Christian doctrine. It won’t even tell you which Christian doctrine is at stake in the chapter to which page 99 belongs.

So let me tell you. It’s the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus. This doctrine, as I argue in Chapter 5, is in effect an extension of the Big Narrative. And the main idea of the chapter (very roughly) is that the followers of Jesus could have been correct in elevating him to divinity and placing him into the Big Narrative in the way they did only if they were following in thought what God had already done; only if God too were operating within the thought world of the Big Narrative. But if the Big Narrative is false, a picture not just peripherally but in its central features unworthy of God, then we must say that God – any real God there may be – would not be associated with the Big Narrative in this way. By identifying with Jesus in the manner required by the divinity doctrine, which according to Christians involved raising Jesus from the dead, God would indeed be confirming something, as has often been said. But this thought should be worrisome instead of deemed helpful, because what God would be confirming is a picture that centrally features an oversimplified understanding of human psychology, an inappropriate response to wrongdoing, and the condoning of violence – a false picture.

That’s a summary of what I call the Big Narrative Argument, which is then developed in Chapter 5 in four more specific ways which – so I argue – show how human intellectual and moral development can be used to undermine the doctrine of a divine Jesus. The other chapters of the book address other doctrines, also on the basis of “what God would have known,” until, by the end, we have twenty new arguments against Christianity’s central classical claims about reality. Only one has to be right for Christian doctrine to be false. If you read the book, let me know which argument you think has the best chance of being right!