Recently in Religious Belief Category

[Note: An incomplete version of this post published earlier. Sorry about that!]

Recently, California State University, Sacramento philosopher Matt McCormick recorded an interview with Luke Muehlhauser in which he discussed atheism. A lively debate broke out in the comments section, and there Matt challenged defenders of reformed epistemology (RE) as follows:

"Maybe you all can just help me understand what this immediate, direct, non-inferential, basic apprehension of God is, exactly. I'm not really interested in theoretical interpretations or descriptions that are couched in abstract theological babble. I just want to hear some descriptions of the actual phenomenology of these moments, experiences, or apprehensions. Describe the sorts of feelings, sights, smells, or apprehensions that are occurring when one is having this direct hookup with God. For analogies, we have the Jodie Foster contacts aliens example and a guy who knows he didn't commit a crime because he recalls being at home watching TV on Saturday night and not robbing a liquor store, or whatever. But obviously, one's encounters with the almighty creator of the universe and master of all reality aren't really going to be like either of these in any shape, manner, or form. So what exactly are they like? And what is it about them that engenders such profound confidence and such strong ontological conclusions?"

I decided to respond to the challenge.

You can find what I wrote, as well as Matt McCormick's response, at Matt's blog, but in case you don't want to read my rambling comment, I'll summarize the relevant portion:

I'm thinking of putting together a volume of new and recent work in religious epistemology. I'm not super-happy with much of what I've found. What do you think is the best recent stuff? It will come as no surprise to readers to find that I'm most interested in critiques of Reformed Epistemology. Well, that's not quite true, I always also love critiques of evidentialism--properly understood--because they make good examples of how evidentialism is "misunderestimated." :-) I also had a friend ask for suggestions on this topic, and I don't want to miss anything in my suggestions.

UPDATE: I've pasted below the fold a preliminary list I've made for my friend. The formatting is jacked up because I had links to all the books and I had him-specific comments on the items. It's left it a bit rough looking and all the links were removed by Movabletype.

Given dissertation and job applications and such, I'm pressed for time, so this post might be a little sloppy and quick. At the recent Pacific SCP, Wes Morriston presented on the problem of genocides in the Bible, and he presented what I took to be a very powerful argument that we should not believe that God commanded genocides in the Bible. I will extract one point from his talk, develop the argument, and hope that it creates helpful discussion.

We've been listening to C.S. Lewis' Narnia Chronicles on CD. I read them when I was about ten years old, and I never got around to re-reading them, so some of it is almost as if I'm experiencing them for the first time. When I got to the following scene from the Silver Chair, it struck me as a strange argument, sort of like Pascal's Wager, but something rubbed me the wrong way about it. The main characters were in the Green Witch's underground domain and had fallen under her influence, which was causing them to lose their belief in the above-ground world. Puddleglum the marsh-wiggle then gives the following speech:

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things-trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's a small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say.

What rubbed me the wrong way was that it sounded as if he didn't care whether the world was real. He was going to believe in it anyway, because it's more pleasant to believe in it. How can the upper world be so much better than the underground world that its mere finite value of being better would be worth believing in a lie if it's not true?

When I raised this issue with a friend, he said, "But it's Pascal's Wager!" I said, "No, it's not!" He insisted that the upper world is Aslan's world, which I'd been thinking of as the place at the end of the world that they went to in the previous book, and the upper world was just Narnia, which is the analogue of Earth. But we were interrupted and never managed to finish the conversation.

I realized later, when teaching Pascal's Wager, what Lewis must have been up to, and it's actually a neat trick. If he was seeing Narnia as a placeholder for the eternal reward of Pascal's Wager and the underworld as a placeholder for this life, then you have an interesting argument that isn't quite Pascal's Wager. Pascal's Wager concedes for the sake of argument that life in this world is more pleasant if you don't believe in God but then argues that the chance of eternal reward in heaven compensates for that in terms of rational decision theory. You shouldn't even need 50% likelihood of God's existence for the wager to be worth it given that the reward is infinite and the cost merely finite if you bet wrong. But Lewis' Wager is different in exactly one way: it doesn't make the concession. It takes the finite value of life in this world to be better if you believe in God than if you don't. So life is finitely better if you believe in God, and the afterlife is infinitely better if it turns out there is one. Therefore, it's a no-brainer. You might as well believe in God. If it turns out you lose the bet (i.e. God doesn't exist), you still end up finitely better off, and if you win (i.e. God does exist) then you get an infinitely better result.

One interesting result of Puddleglum's Wager is that it easily avoids the problem Mike Almeida raises against Pascal's Wager. Mike's problem (which I'm not taking a stand on at this point) relies on its being better in this life not to believe.

[cross-posted at Parableman]

From September 10-12, Notre Dame held a conference called "My Ways Are not Your Ways: The Character of the God of the Hebrew Bible". The focus of the conference was on the"hard passages" from the Bible, particularly from the Old Testament: instances where God seems to command genocide, rape, child sacrifice, and other such things. I can't remember a conference that I was more excited to see. And it didn't disappoint--it may have been the most rewarding conference I've attended.

Originally, I thought I would live-blog the conference, but because I fell under the impression both that the presentations, along with their responses, would be collected into a book, and that videos of at least the Q&A sessions would eventually be posted to the website (don't quote me on that, though), I decided I would instead post something more impressionistic.

Let's take reformed epistemology, at a first approximation, to be the view that beliefs about God can be properly basic. A belief is basic iff it is not held on the basis of another belief, and a belief is properly basic iff it is basic and has positive epistemic status. I say beliefs about God rather than the specific belief that God exists, because, following Plantinga, it is more likely that the properly basic beliefs humans have will have contents such as God is speaking to me, God is with me now, God is to be praised, and so forth. Each of these propositions would be the obvious basis for belief that God exists, and this belief could be very quickly and easily inferred. This is the sort of stuff Plantinga said in his very early work.

I've been working through Huemer's recent book Ethical Intuitionism, and I've overall been finding it to be exceptionally clear and well written, especially compared to a lot of other metaethics and moral epistemology I've read.

Huemer raises a series of objections to Divine Command Theory (DCT), the view that "that right actions are right only because God commands them" (p. 55). His second objection is as follows:

There is quite a bit of interesting material in these sections; I’ve tried to cover most of it while keeping the word count down as much as possible. At the end, I’ll raise a couple of objections and propose a friendly(ish) amendment to Moser’s overall project.

Having left Athens behind, Moser turns his focus to Jerusalem, and in particular the “kerygmatic core” of the Good News movement, according to which God sent or raised Jesus (why not “and”?), the proper response to which brings certain benefits (p. 163). Moser then explores (pp. 164ff.) some of the controversial questions surrounding the atonement—i.e., some of the questions regarding the connection between the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus on the one hand, and the forgiveness of human sins (human “resistance to divine unselfish love”) on the other. Moser labels his approach to the atonement the divine manifest offering approach, and he summarizes it as follows (p. 165):

Moser does three main things in sections 5-8 of chapter 2:

1. He gives an explanation for divine hiddenness
2. He gives a deeper explanation of purposively available divine reality using the notion of attunement
3. He gives an argument for God's existence.

I will briefly describe these three things and raise a few questions along the way.

1. Divine Hiddenness

Moser provides a handful of possible explanations for divine hiddenness, distances himself from two popular explanations, and then makes a move that is quite analogous to the skeptical theist response to the problem of evil.

Moser calls his reply to the problem of divine hiddenness the Divine Purposes Reply, which states, "God would restrain divine manifestations, at least for a time, to at least some humans in order to enhance satisfaction of God's own diverse perfectly authoritative and loving purposes regarding humans" (110). Furthermore, there isn't one particular purpose that God's hiding satisfies. Moser suggests the following as some of God's purposes:

(Cross-posted to my own blog.)

Some people, I think, are still under the impression that the infinities in Pascal's wager create trouble. Thus, there is the argument that even if you don't believe now, you might come to believe later, and hence the expected payoff for not believing now is also infinite (discounting hell), just as the payoff for believing now. Or there is the argument that you might believe now and end up in hell, so the payoff for believing now is undefined: infinity minus infinity.

But there are mathematically rigorous ways of modeling these infinities, such as Non-Standard Analysis (NSA) or Conway's surreal numbers. The basic idea is that we extend the field of real numbers to a larger ordered field with all of the same arithmetical operations, where the larger field contains numbers that are bigger than any standard real number (positive infinity), numbers that are bigger than zero and smaller than any positive standard real number (positive infinitesimals), etc. One works with the larger field by exactly the same rules as one works with reals. This is all perfectly rigorous.

Let's do an example of how it works. Suppose I am choosing between Christianity, Islam and Atheism. Let C, I and A be the claims that the respective view is true. Let's simplify by supposing I have three options: BC (believe and practice Christianity), BI (believe and practice Islam) and NR (no religious belief or practice).

Now I think about the payoff matrix. It's going to be something like this, where the columns depend on what is true and the rows on what I do:

	C	I	A
BC	0.9X-0.1Y	0.7X-0.3Y	-a
BI	0.6X-0.4Y	0.9X-0.1Y	-b
NR	0.4X-0.6Y	0.4X-0.6Y	c

Here, X is the payoff of heaven and -Y is the payoff of hell, and X and Y are positive infinities. I assume that the Christian and Islamic heavens are equally nice, and that the Christian and Islamic hells are equally unpleasant. The lowercase letters a, b and c indicate finite positive numbers. How did I come up with the table? Well, I made it up. But not completely arbitrarily. For instance, BC/C (I will use that symbolism to indicate the value in the C column of the BC row) is 0.9X-0.1Y. I was thinking: if Christianity is true, and you believe and practice it, there is a 90% chance you'll go to heaven and a 10% chance you'll go to hell. On the other hand, BC/I is 0.7X-0.3Y, because Islam expressly accepts the possibility of salvation for Christians (at least as long as they're not ex-Muslims, I think), but presumably the likelihood is lower than for a Muslim. BI/C is 0.6X-0.4Y, because while there are well developed Christian theological views on which a Muslim can be saved, these views are probably not an integral part of the tradition, so the BI/C expected payoff is lower than the BC/I one. The C and I columns of the tables should also include some finite numbers summands, but those aren't going to matter. A lot of the numbers can be tweaked in various ways, and I've taken somewhat more "liberal" (in the etymological sense) numbers--thus, some might say that the payoff of NR/C is 0.1X-0.9Y, etc.

What should one do, now? Well, it all depends on the epistemic probabilities of C, I and A. Let's suppose that they are: 0.1, 0.1 and 0.8, and calculate the payoffs of the three actions.

The expected payoff of BC is EBC = 0.1 (0.9X - 0.1Y) + 0.1 (0.7X - 0.3Y) + 0.8 (-a) = 0.16X - 0.04Y - 0.8a.

The expected payoff of BI is EBI = 0.15X - 0.05Y - 0.8b.

The expected payoff of NR is ENR = 0.08X - 0.12Y + 0.8c.

Now, let's compare these. EBC - EBI = 0.01X + 0.01Y + 0.8(b-a). Since X and Y are positive infinities, and b and a are finite, EBC - EBI > 0. So, EBC > EBI. EBI - ENR = 0.07X + 0.07Y - 0.8(b+c). Again, then EBI - ENR > 0 and so EBI > ENR. Just to be sure, we can also check EBC - ENR = 0.08X + 0.08Y - 0.8(a+c) > 0 so EBC > ENR.

Therefore, our rank ordering is: EBC > EBI > ENR. It's most prudent to become Christian, less prudent to become a Muslim and less prudent yet to have no religion. There are infinities all over the place in the calculations, but we can rigorously compare them.

This is the third weekly post on Moser's book The Elusive God.

There are many things Moser says, and I will not provide a comprehensive summary. Many of the things he says can be personally challenging if one takes them to heart.

In 3.1, I took Moser to be presenting an interesting argument that belief in naturalism is not rational. (It's not obvious that he's doing this, but see below.) In 3.2, I took him to be emphasizing that it is God who decides how we should come to believe in God. In 3.3, I took him to be talking about how we should have filial knowledge of God, which is not something one gains by way of spectator evidence or natural theology. It is knowledge of God as loving Father and as a moral authority in our lives. In 3.4, I took him to be explaining what is involved in "cognitive idolatry", and how God should be the supreme cognitive authority in our lives.

I wonder if any of what Moser is saying commits him to empirical claims about skeptics. As I read him, I keep getting the feeling that he is: I get the sense that he is saying that they are selfish, unwilling to submit to higher authorities (like God), unwilling to follow their consciences in certain areas, desire to be autonomous, and perhaps more. Of course, Moser hasn't directly said these things, I think. (Moser doesn't say believers don't have these tendencies, but I think he'd say that they have chosen to refrain from them, and so are able to come to know God.)