The Courtier’s Reply

The Courtier’s Reply is a rhetorical concept introduced by the American biologist and blogger PZ Myers in a post published on December 24, 2006, on his science blog Pharyngula. The post was a direct response to H. Allen Orr’s review of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion in The New York Review of Books, in which Orr had complained that Dawkins had failed to engage seriously with the tradition of sophisticated academic theology before delivering his verdict against religious belief.^{1, 3} Myers’s reply reframed this objection as a parody of Hans Christian Andersen’s fable The Emperor’s New Clothes: just as the emperor’s courtiers insisted that any observer who failed to admire the nonexistent wardrobe must simply not appreciate fine tailoring, theologians insist that any critic of religion who has not mastered Aquinas, Plantinga, and the full tradition of natural theology must simply not have done the required reading.^{1, 9}

The concept entered wide circulation within atheist and skeptical communities and has been invoked regularly in debates about the so-called New Atheism — the wave of popular atheist writing that emerged in the mid-2000s from Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett.^{2, 4, 5, 10} Critics of this movement frequently argued that its authors had engaged only with popular or fundamentalist religion and had ignored the most philosophically defensible versions of theistic belief. The Courtier’s Reply gave a name and a structure to the counter-response: that this demand for theological expertise prior to criticism is itself a rhetorical deflection rather than a substantive answer to the objections being raised.

Origin and context

Myers’s coinage arose from a specific critical encounter. In his January 2007 review — written in late 2006, when advance copies of The God Delusion were circulating — H. Allen Orr, a professor of biology at the University of Rochester, argued that Dawkins had written a book that would have been more at home in the eighteenth century. Orr maintained that Dawkins was unaware of the serious philosophical and theological work done since the Enlightenment, that he had not engaged with the cosmological and ontological arguments in their most rigorous forms, and that his confident dismissal of religious belief rested on a caricature of what sophisticated theists actually believe.³ This criticism was not unique to Orr; variants of it appeared in reviews by Terry Eagleton, Marilynne Robinson, and others who objected that Dawkins was tilting at a straw man.

Myers found this line of objection unconvincing and structured his parody carefully. In the original fable, a child observes that the emperor is naked and says so.⁹ Myers imagined a courtier stepping forward to tell the child that the emperor’s non-existent suit was, in fact, made by the finest tailors in the land, that its cut and material were of the highest quality, and that anyone who had not first studied the history of textile arts, the principles of haute couture, and the full tradition of royal dressmaking was in no position to comment on the emperor’s apparel. The point of the parody was that the child’s observation — “the emperor has no clothes” — does not require expertise in fashion to be valid. The evidential situation is accessible to anyone with eyes, and no amount of courtly sophistication changes the underlying fact.¹

Applied to religion, the parody targets the claim that the basic criticism — there is no good evidence that God exists — requires theological mastery before it can be advanced. Just as the flaw in the emperor’s wardrobe is visible without a degree in fashion design, the absence of evidence for God’s existence is assessable without a comprehensive command of the Summa Theologiae or the modal ontological argument.^{1, 2}

The argument it addresses

The objection that the New Atheists were criticising a straw man took several related forms, all of which are captured by the Courtier’s Reply label. The most common version held that Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris were attacking popular or fundamentalist religion while ignoring the long tradition of philosophical theology associated with figures such as Thomas Aquinas, Anselm of Canterbury, John Duns Scotus, and in the twentieth century, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, and David Bentley Hart. On this account, a genuine engagement with the question of God’s existence requires grappling with the cosmological argument in its most refined forms, the ontological argument as reconstructed by modal logicians, and the Thomistic account of divine being as ipsum esse subsistens — Being itself, not a being among beings.^{7, 8}

A sharper version of the objection, associated especially with Hart, held that the New Atheists did not merely ignore sophisticated theology but actively misconstrued the concept of God they were rejecting. Hart argued at length in The Experience of God (2013) that Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris were attacking a kind of cosmic engineer or super-being, a very large and powerful person who tinkers with the universe, rather than the God of classical theism — which Hart described, following the Thomistic tradition, as the infinite ground of being, consciousness, and bliss from which all existence derives and without which nothing could be.⁷ On this account, refuting the existence of a divine super-being is entirely consistent with the existence of God in the classical sense, making the New Atheists’ arguments irrelevant to the question actually in dispute.¹⁷

Myers’s reply, and the general response it crystallised, is that this demand for theological sophistication functions as a gatekeeping device that insulates religious claims from ordinary critical scrutiny. The critic is always told that they have not read the right theologian, have not understood the technical vocabulary, have not appreciated the subtlety of the tradition. The goalposts are perpetually in motion: when Aquinas is refuted, the reply is that one must engage with Scotus; when the cosmological argument is addressed, the reply is that one must engage with the ontological argument; when the ontological argument is addressed, the reply is that one must engage with reformed epistemology. The cumulative effect is that the requirement of theological expertise functions not as a genuine intellectual standard but as an unfalsifiability strategy.^{1, 13}

Why the reply has force

The Courtier’s Reply gains its traction from a straightforward epistemological point: the core claims of religion as actually practised are empirical claims that can be evaluated on evidential grounds that are independent of academic theology. When a believer prays and expects an answer, when a congregation holds that a miracle occurred, when a tradition asserts that its founder was resurrected from the dead, these are claims about events in the world. They are, in principle, open to the same kind of evidential evaluation as any other claim about events in the world.^{16, 12}

The empirical track record of such claims is poor. Systematic studies of intercessory prayer have found no reliable effect above chance.¹⁶ Historical analysis of miracle reports consistently finds that they cluster in pre-scientific contexts, that they multiply with time and distance from the alleged event, and that they fail to survive scrutiny when subject to contemporaneous investigation. The claims that distinguish Christianity from other religions — that Jesus was born of a virgin, performed miracles, was crucified and physically raised — are historical claims whose evidential basis can be assessed through the tools of historical criticism. None of this evaluation requires mastery of Plantinga’s reformed epistemology or Hart’s neo-Thomistic metaphysics.

A second point is that academic theology characteristically presupposes the existence of God rather than establishing it. The tradition of natural theology, from Aquinas’s Five Ways to Swinburne’s Bayesian formulation, does attempt to argue from features of the world to God’s existence.^{8, 18} But a large body of academic theology — systematic theology, biblical theology, doctrinal theology, pastoral theology — takes God’s existence as its starting point and proceeds to elaborate the divine nature, the relationship between God and the world, and the content of revelation. When critics are told they must master this literature before they can criticise religion, they are in effect being told to master a tradition that begs the central question. Expertise in the internal coherence of a worldview that assumes its own central claim does not constitute grounds for accepting that claim.¹³

Where the sophisticated theology objection has legitimate force

The Courtier’s Reply is a diagnostic concept, not an absolute refutation of the demand for philosophical care. There is a legitimate version of the sophisticated theology objection, and it is worth distinguishing it clearly from the deflective version that Myers was targeting.¹

The legitimate version holds that some philosophical arguments for theism are genuinely more nuanced than popular New Atheist treatments acknowledge, and that misrepresenting these arguments is both intellectually dishonest and rhetorically counterproductive. Dawkins’s treatment of the cosmological argument in The God Delusion, for instance, characterises it as the claim that everything has a cause, then notes that God must also have a cause, and concludes that the argument fails.² This does fairly capture some popular versions of the cosmological argument. But Aquinas’s actual argument, particularly in the Summa Contra Gentiles, does not assert that everything has a cause; it distinguishes between essentially ordered causal series and accidentally ordered ones, and argues that an essentially ordered series requires a concurrent first cause, not merely a first cause in a temporal sequence. Whether the argument succeeds is a separate question, but Dawkins’s response does not engage with the version actually on offer in the Thomistic tradition.^{8, 12}

Similarly, Plantinga’s reformed epistemology, developed across God and Other Minds (1967), Warranted Christian Belief (2000), and subsequent work, is a serious contribution to epistemology that raises genuine questions about the structure of epistemic justification.⁶ The argument that belief in God can be “properly basic” — rationally held without being inferred from other beliefs, in the same way that perceptual beliefs and memory beliefs are held — is not obviously fallacious, and it has attracted sustained engagement from philosophers who are not sympathetic to theism.^{6, 15} A critic who dismisses it without engagement is not engaging with the best available case for theism.

The distinction the Courtier’s Reply draws is not between engaging carefully and engaging carelessly; it is between the legitimacy of a demand for theological expertise as a precondition for criticism and the value of theological literacy as an improvement on criticism.¹ The courtier’s error is to treat the precondition as absolute, so that no criticism can be valid until the full canon has been mastered. The child in the fable did not need couture expertise to see the emperor was naked, but a fashion critic reviewing a real garment would do better to know what they are talking about.⁹

Plantinga, Hart, and the fundamental evidential situation

The question of whether genuine engagement with Plantinga and Hart alters the fundamental evidential situation regarding theism is philosophically important. The honest answer is: it complicates the epistemological picture without resolving the underlying question in favour of theism.^{6, 7}

Plantinga’s reformed epistemology argues that the cognitive faculties of a person who believes in God may be functioning properly, and that if they are, then theistic belief is warranted — that is, produced by reliable faculties aimed at truth, which is the condition Plantinga identifies as necessary and sufficient for knowledge.⁶ The crucial conditional is “if they are functioning properly,” and the condition for proper function is spelled out theistically: the sensus divinitatis (the faculty Plantinga posits for producing theistic belief) functions properly if God exists and created it for this purpose. This means that Plantinga’s account of the warrant for theistic belief is internally conditional on the truth of theism itself. It tells us that if theism is true, theistic belief can be warranted; it does not tell us, independently, that theism is true. As Plantinga himself acknowledges, the question of whether theistic belief is de facto true is distinct from the question of whether it is warranted, and his epistemological argument does not settle the former.^{6, 15}

Hart’s approach is different in kind. In The Experience of God, Hart does not primarily offer arguments for God’s existence in the evidentialist mode; he offers a conceptual clarification of what the God of classical theism is, arguing that most atheist critiques are directed at a concept of God that no serious theologian has ever defended. The God Hart describes — infinite being, consciousness, and bliss; the necessary ground of all contingent existence; the source from which all reality flows — is not a being within the universe, not subject to natural laws, not one cause among others. Atheist arguments that work against a cosmic designer do not, Hart contends, touch this concept of God at all.⁷

The force of the Courtier’s Reply against Hart is somewhat different from its force against Plantinga. Hart’s conceptual move — identifying God with Being itself rather than with a particular being — has the effect of making the concept of God increasingly abstract and detached from the empirical claims of actual religious practice. If God is infinite being beyond all determination, it becomes unclear what specific events in the world could count as evidence for or against this God’s existence, or what the difference would be between this God existing and not existing in terms of the world’s observable features. The classical theist who follows Hart to his conclusions has arguably moved toward a metaphysical position so abstract that the unfalsifiability of theism critique applies with considerable force: the more theologically sophisticated the concept of God becomes, the less it resembles the God of popular religious belief, and the less it connects to the empirical claims — miracles, answered prayer, divine intervention — on which most believers actually rely.^{13, 17}

Popular religion versus academic theology

A persistent tension in debates about the Courtier’s Reply concerns the relationship between popular religious belief and academic theology. The demand that critics engage with Aquinas and Plantinga before criticising religion presupposes that these thinkers are representative of what is actually being criticised. This presupposition is questionable in both directions.^{1, 3}

From the critics’ perspective, the billions of people who hold religious beliefs overwhelmingly do not hold them in the refined form presented by academic theology. The average Catholic parishioner, Protestant evangelical, or Muslim believer does not think of God as ipsum esse subsistens or understand divine action through the lens of primary and secondary causation. They believe in a personal God who hears and sometimes answers prayers, who intervenes in history, who cares about the behaviour of individuals, and who is identified with the God described in the scripture and tradition of their particular community. It is this religion — the religion as actually practised by its adherents — that Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris were primarily criticising, and it is therefore not obvious that the failure to engage with Plantinga constitutes a failure to engage with the target.^{2, 4}

From the theologians’ perspective, the identification of religion with its popular manifestations underestimates the extent to which academic theology shapes and informs popular practice through institutions, catechesis, liturgy, and clerical formation. The doctrines affirmed in Christian creeds, for instance, are not the spontaneous expressions of lay believers but the products of sustained philosophical and theological reflection across centuries. To criticise popular religion without engaging with the conceptual framework that underlies it is, on this account, to critique a surface while ignoring the depth structure that generates it.^{8, 14}

The most accurate position acknowledges both points. Popular religion and academic theology are related but distinct objects of inquiry. A full assessment of theism requires engagement with both. But the Courtier’s Reply correctly identifies that demanding academic theological expertise as a precondition for any criticism whatsoever is a deflection: it moves the target from the religion that billions actually practise to a refined academic position that most believers would not recognise as their own, and it uses that move to protect the popular religion from scrutiny it could not survive.^{1, 11}

Epistemic gatekeeping

The broader issue the Courtier’s Reply raises is the use of complexity and expertise as rhetorical shields. This pattern is not unique to theology; it appears in any domain where a body of established authority can be invoked to preempt criticism from outside the professional guild. Political ideologies have their own version: critics of Marxism are told they have not read enough Marx, Hegel, and Gramsci; critics of libertarianism are told they have not engaged with Mises and Hayek in sufficient depth. The demand is structurally identical in each case, and the Courtier’s Reply applies with equal force in each: the complexity of a body of thought does not in itself validate its conclusions, and the requirement that critics achieve guild-level expertise before their objections can be heard is a gatekeeping strategy rather than a substantive defence.¹¹

In the case of religion specifically, the gatekeeping function is compounded by the asymmetry between the resources available to professional theologians and those available to ordinary critics. Academic theology has millennia of accumulated argument, a substantial professional literature, and a class of specialists whose livelihood depends on the continued elaboration and defence of theological positions.^{11, 13} Critics who lack this institutional support are at a structural disadvantage that the Courtier’s Reply can exploit indefinitely: there is always another theologian who has not been read, another nuance that has not been appreciated, another objection that has not been addressed in sufficiently technical terms.

This does not mean that theological expertise is without value. The critique of religion is better for understanding what it is actually criticising, and careless misrepresentation of theological positions is both intellectually vicious and counterproductive. But the value of engagement with sophisticated theology is an improvement in the quality of criticism, not a precondition for criticism being permissible. The child in Andersen’s fable was right before the tailors’ guild had been consulted, and the observation did not require expert endorsement to be valid.^{9, 1}

Significance

The Courtier’s Reply has proved durable as a concept because it names something real: a rhetorical pattern in which the requirement of expertise is deployed to prevent engagement rather than improve it. Its value is diagnostic. When someone responds to a criticism of religion by saying that the critic has not read enough theology, the Courtier’s Reply provides a framework for asking the right question: is the invoked theology actually relevant to the claim being criticised, or is it a change of subject? If a critic argues that there is no reliable evidence that prayer affects outcomes, the response that they have not engaged with Plantinga’s epistemology is a non-sequitur. If a critic argues that the cosmological argument fails to establish a personal creator, the response that they have misunderstood Aquinas may be entirely apt.

The concept also reflects a genuine tension within modern atheism between popular critique and philosophical rigour. The New Atheist works that prompted Myers’s post were written for general audiences and prioritised accessibility over technical precision. That choice has real costs: it meant that some of the arguments in those books were weaker than they needed to be, and that theologians had legitimate grounds for finding the treatments shallow. The Courtier’s Reply is best understood not as a licence for intellectual carelessness but as a guard against the infinite regress of required expertise — the recognition that there is a difference between the legitimate demand for accuracy and the illegitimate demand for prior submission to the authority of the tradition being criticised.

In the philosophy of religion, the concept connects to broader debates about the burden of proof, the relationship between reformed epistemology and evidentialism, and the unfalsifiability of theism. It is, at its core, a claim about who bears the burden of proof and what counts as an adequate discharge of it: the critic who observes that the emperor has no clothes does not owe the court a dissertation in the history of fashion before the observation can be taken seriously.^{1, 13}