May 2012 Archives

I've just returned from a wonderful 2-day philosophy of religion workshop at Glasgow organized by Victoria Harrison, who put together a diverse and high-quality program. One of these exciting papers was by Joshua Rollins' (U of Oklahoma) on the common consent argument.
Roughly speaking, in its crudest form, the Common Consent argument (CCA) goes as follows:

1. Most people believe in God


2. Therefore, God exists

This argument, traditionally widely endorsed, has fallen on hard times. Not only does it seem problematic to infer the truth of a belief from its mere popularity, declining religiosity in the western world have challenged premise (1). However, the recent shift in epistemology to social epistemology has rekindled an interest in the CCA. As Joshua indicated, social epistemologists have convincingly demonstrated that we do (and ought) take other people's opinion into account as evidence. We do this in the case of testimony - where we acquire a vast amount of knowledge through other people - and in the case of peer disagreement, where disagreement with others is a fact we need to take into consideration in many cases. In what follows, I'll reflect on some ideas offered by Thomas Kelly, who wrote a recent paper on CCA, and implications of cognitive science of religion for CCA.

As promised, here is the second fine-grained analysis of the results of my survey. The analyses have been done by Robert O'Brien, a medical statistician from Miami University. The statistics are fairly technical, and below this short summary you can find the complete statistical analysis.

Here I report how philosophers rate the arguments against theism in my survey. I presented 8 arguments against theism (see here for an overview of the arguments and general info on the survey) and asked participants to rate how strong they found them, ranging from very weak to very strong.

What I was interested in is how religious belief (theism/atheism/agnosticism) affects the assessment of these arguments. Initially, pooling all arguments together, it seemed like PoR had little effect, but when considering each argument separately, it turns out that PoR does influence the assessment of individual arguments. There were also gender effects.

All of the extant definitions of omnipotence are missing what seems to me to be an important ingredient. A typical definition says something like: "God can do anything that's logically possible." But that's not quite enough. One needs to specify that God can do everything effortlessly. This is an easy emendation, of course, but an important one.

As part of our Templeton Funded project "Exploring Alternative Concepts of God", Andrei Buckareff (Marist College) and I conducted a survey in January this year. The following is our analysis of the results. We are sorry it took so long to post this. We would like to thank everyone who responded to the survey.

Since the summer break is nearly here, I thought I'd remind folks of the Younger Scholars Prize so that the summer break could be used to write/finish entries. Here's the ad:

Prosblogion readers will most likely be interested in the competition details for the Younger Scholars Prize for Philosophical Theology.

I am defending a soul-making theodicy for animals in the book, and I am going to briefly summarize some objections and reply to them. Google Scholar turns up not a whole lot on the surface, and I might as well respond to people's actual concerns, so, if you please, let me know what objections/articles/chapters you find most worthy of being responded to. Thanks.

[x-posted on Newapps] A few days ago, I had the privilege of attending a lecture by Paul Draper, probably one of the most prominent atheist philosophers of religion today. His lecture had a wealth of ideas (including a proposed solution to Hume's problem!), but I'd like to focus on one tiny piece of the lecture, viz. his argument that the burden of proof is on the theist, and not on the atheist.

Here goes the argument, which Paul was kind enough to discuss with me, prior to posting it. I apologize if there are any remnant misrepresentations.

Let's assume that there are a number of epistemically possible world views: some are naturalistic, some are supernaturalistic, let's even grant there are others (non-supernatural, non-natural, but some third, unknown view). Then we can see that the following diagram exhausts all epistemic possibilities: N (naturalism), S (supernaturalism) and not-N and not-S.

Let 'PSR' stand for the principle that whatever is, but need not be, has an explanation for its being.

More exactly:

(PSR) Whatever obtains, but doesn't obtain of necessity, has an explanation for its obtaining.

Equivalently: Every contingent state of affairs has an explanation.

One might think that PSR has both a priori and empirical support. Regarding the a priori, when we consider an arbitrary state of affairs that obtains but doesn't have to obtain, we feel motivated to wonder why it obtains; and that wonder seems to reveal an inclination in us to think there ought to be an explanation.

As for empirical support, PSR is a simple (the simplest?) explanation of all the cases of explanation anyone has encountered.

The support is defeated, however, if there are counter-examples to PSR. And, my sense is that most philosophers these days think or suspect or worry that there are counter-examples.

Perhaps the most commonly cited counter-examples are these: (1) quantum events, and (2) the Biggest Contingent Fact. It turns out to be difficult, however, to get these counter-examples to stick, as I'll attempt to explain. I'll focus more on (2), since I take it to be the more serious candidate.

On September 6-8, 2012, Purdue University will host an interdisciplinary conference entitled "Challenges to Religious and Moral Belief: Disagreement and Evolution".

The conference will focus on three main challenges to religious and moral beliefs:

1. Widespread interpersonal disagreement among intellectual peers on religious and on moral topics provides reason to doubt these beliefs;


2. Belief-source disagreement on moral issues between commonsense moral intuitions and religious belief sources raises doubts about both methods of belief formation;


3. Evolutionary accounts of the origins of our religious and moral beliefs create doubts about these beliefs by undermining our confidence in the reliability of their sources.

In chapter 6 of his Philosophical Theology (1969), James F. Ross undertakes the very ambitious task of showing that the evil in the world does not provide even a prima facie case against divine moral perfection. Ross takes the phrase 'a prima facie case' in the legal sense: to provide a prima facie case is essentially to bring charges that need answering. So, for instance, someone who says that the evils in the world are justified by some greater good which would be impossible without them is conceding that there is a prima facie case and attempting to answer it. Ross believes that there is no such case that needs answering. After explaining his argument, I will show that, even if Ross's answer to the alleged conflict between the evils of the world and divine moral perfection succeeds, the evils of the world can still be used to make a prima facie case against divine benevolence, and Ross's strategy cannot be used to defuse this.

European Journal for Philosophy of Religion (EJPR) is a peer-reviewed international scholarly journal devoted to the problems of the philosophy of religion as these arise out of classical and contemporary discussions and from varied religious traditions. Launched in 2009, this quarterly journal has published wide-ranging and high-quality scholarship, including the work of a number of leading figures in the field. For further information about the journal, including submission procedures, please see http://philosophy-of-religion.eu/.

-- Timothy O'Connor, North American Editor

UPDATE: I want to clarify one thing here. My principle target was not the authors of the study (which I have no intention to read, as I judge that doing so has negative expected utility). Rather, my principle target was the editors of SA. The author of the article is a minor target (its bad reporting) but she probably gave the editors what she had every right to expect they wanted. Here is what I would have said in a calmer moment:

"People have been implying that the content of this article casts aspersons on the rationality of religious belief. I assert that that is false and confused. I dare (double dog dare) anyone to construct a cogent argument from the content of this article which casts aspersions on the rationality of religious belief. I assert that it cannot be done. I also find the article greatly misleading in multiple ways and perhaps culpably so."

I still think it is worth recording my initial reaction, though, so that friends who posted this article in ways that implied that it did cast aspersions on the rationality of religious belief--there were too many to write individually--can see the palpable frustration with which such misdirection causes people like me: Christions living in a very secularized environment where people they really like often say or do things very hurtful (though not intentionally, of course). There are many ways in which it is not easy to be a Christian in academic philosophy. Being an unprotected minority is frustrating, anxiety-inducing (I received threats as a result of this post), and sometimes deeply discouraging. [Any other Christians who feel this way should redouble their efforts to reach out to other minorities and simply set aside in good faith the fact that those minorities have advocates in a way that we do not, for we have our own Advocate.]

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That venerable publishing outlet of the Secular-Industrial Establishment the Scientific American at least once had decent journalism and intelligent writing. That started to slide at least a decade ago, and though there are still some occasional gems, there is also plenty of tripe. To wit: this article called--utterly misleadingly--"How Critical Thinkers Lose Their Faith in God: Religious belief drops when analytical thinking rises.

Rarely have I been so annoyed as by this piece. And it is a token of a type that is all too prevalent. I judge, and hope I do not regret it, that the removal of the snarkiness would not be worth the effort. I don't like being drawn into such rhetoric, but it is not irrelevant that the piece made me *angry*. Anger is an emotion that can be appropriate or inappropriate and upon reflection, I think anger is an appropriate emotional response to this nonsense. #notproofread #lateforconference