Recently in Religious Belief Category

John Hawthorne has been awarded a generous grant from Templeton for work on religious epistemology. There are fellowship possibilities. See here.

Some responses to the Problem of Evil involve defending the proposition that it is on balance a good thing that the world was created. I want to propose a Problem of Mediocrity or Problem of the Just-Good-Enough or more broadly the Problem of the Not-Great world. As I envision it, it's disconfirmation of theism is compatible with the world being on balance good. It goes like this:

(1) Being the kind of Being God is, we expect greatness in everything He does.
(2) The world is not great.
(3) Hence, theism is disconfirmed.

I'll refine it a bit below and raise an objection below the fold

In my previous post on Sobel's treatment of Pascalian wagers, I indicated that, although I accept a strong thesis about the autonomy of theoretical reason, I believe that religious faith has more to do with practical than with theoretical reason. Now, faith can have as its object either a person or a proposition. (There are also other uses, like having faith in a theory, but I take these two to be the central ones.) Call the former faith-in (as in, 'I have faith in you') and the latter faith-that (as in, 'I have faith that everything will turn out alright'). I take it that religious faith involves both of these. (I have faith-in Jesus and faith-that he rose from the dead.) I believe that the central concept in both cases is that of an attitude of practical reliance. Or, to put it in a plain English slogan, faith means not hedging your bets. If you tell me that you have complete faith in me, but keep looking over my shoulder to make sure I'm not screwing things up, I won't believe you. Similarly, if you purport to have faith that everything will turn out alright, but spend a lot of time and energy fretting about it (whatever 'it' might be), I won't believe you. These actions are not constitutive of a lack of faith; they are evidence of a lack of faith. The faith itself is a certain practical attitude which is exhibited by relying on the person, or on the truth of the proposition. I'll be focused here mostly on faith-that, because I think faith-in might be reducible to faith-that the person one has faith-in is reliable, or some such.

The interesting cases of faith are those in which the degree of practical reliance on the person or proposition is much greater than one's theoretical credence in the person's reliability or the proposition's truth. This, I think, is what gives rise to the misconception that faith is belief on insufficient evidence, or belief contrary to the evidence. However, it can be perfectly rational for one's practical reliance to outstrip one's theoretical credences in this way. This happens, for instance, when I put my very life into the hands of a physician I know very little about. If I am in immediate danger of dying, I may even entrust myself to a physician whose competence or good-will I have positive reason to doubt, if another is unavailable. What is important here, is that I don't give practical consideration to the possibility that the physician will fail (or worse), despite the fact that I know (theoretically) that this is a very real possibility. Why? Well, if I don't trust the physician and follow his directions, I'll die for sure. It would be practically irrational to start second-guessing him.

In the 13th and final chapter of his book, Sobel discusses Pascalian wagers. According to Sobel, there need not be anything wrong with the practical reasoning involved in a Pascalian wager. In addition to defending this controversial claim, Sobel must explain how, if the Pascalian reasoning is correct, he can be justified in holding on to his atheism. As the chapter unfolds, both contentions are defended as a package. In general, for reasons to be explained below, I disagree with Sobel's approach here. However, I do agree with him on one thing: religious faith is more a matter of practical than of theoretical reason. In this post I will explain Sobel's approach and my reasons for disagreeing with it, and in the next I will lay out my own view of the interplay of theoretical and practical reason in religious faith.

Pascal's original wager went something like this: if you believe in God and you are right, you gain eternal bliss. If you believe in God and you are wrong, you lose little or nothing. If you don't believe in God and you are right, you gain little or nothing. If you don't believe in God and you are wrong, things will go very badly for you. (According to Sobel, Pascal himself regards heaven as infinitely good, but hell as only finitely bad.)

Now, the first problem we face is that we can't just decide to believe things.For now, though, imagine we could. It seems, in Pascal's case, that it would then be practically rational to believe in God, as long as we think that there is even the slightest (epistemic) possibility of his existence.

In case you missed it, Tom Senor reviews Moser's The Evidence For God: Religious Knowledge Reexamined for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

...The Evidence for God is daring and provocative. Among the important topics it deals with are naturalism, fideism, natural theology, and the role that volition plays in our ascertaining evidence of God's existence.

The book begins with a parable around which the entire monograph revolves. Imagine that you are hiking in a vast and remote wilderness area that is accessible only to hikers. To your great dismay, you discover that you are hopelessly lost: you have no method of determining either your exact location or a promising route back to civilization. The woods are filled with dangers (e.g., poisonous snakes, hungry carnivores, and potentially freezing temperatures) and you have no means of communication with the outside world. Worse still, you have only a meager supply of food and water. You've had one bit of good fortune: you've come across an old, dilapidated shack that contains a barely functional ham radio. The battery in the radio still has a bit of juice, although you doubt it will last long once the radio is turned on. In short, your situation is dire but not hopeless. What is your best bet for survival?

Continuing the recent theme of skeptical theism. It only recently occurred to me to puzzle over the fact that skeptical theism--at least for leading proponent Mike Bergmann--has nothing to do with theism. Of course, there's the axiom ST ---> T, but that's not what I'm talking about.

What I mean is that skeptical theism's skeptical thesis are just about the nature of the good. That seems a *bit* odd to me: there's nothing theological motivating skeptical theism as Bergmann expresses it. It has nothing obvious to do with "God's ways being greater than ours." It's just that we don't understand goodness well enough.

And here's another thing I noticed recently that bothered me--then I'll put the criticism below the fold: It's almost all deontolgical stuff. But I'm a virtue and value guy. As such, I think I have some insight into the *nature* of the good, which tells me something about *all* goods. This gives one more purchase than may be compatible with Bergmann's versions of the "S" in "ST."

Wittgensteinians lay stress on the idea that

1. One cannot understand central worldview concepts without living as part of a community that operates with these concepts.

Often, a corollary is drawn from this, that while internal critique or justification of a worldview tradition such as Christianity, naturalism or Nazism is possible, no external critique or justification is possible. In fact, there is an argument for this corollary.

2. (Premise) One's evidence set cannot involve any propositions that involve concepts one does not understand.
3. (Premise) Necessarily, if a proposition p uses a concept C, and a body of propositions P is evidence for or against p for an agent x, then some member of P involves C.
4. If x is not a member of the community operating with a central worldview concept C, then x does not have any evidence for or against any proposition involving C. (1-3)
5. (Premise) External critique or justification of a worldview of a community is possible only if someone who is not a member of the community can have evidence for or against a proposition involving a central worldview concept of that community.
6. Therefore, external critique or justification of a worldview of a community is not possible. (4 and 5)

The argument is valid but unsound, and I think unsalvageable. I think that (5) is false, and on some plausible interpretations of (1), (2) and (3) are false as well.

Regarding religious epistemology, I'm much more well-versed in Plantinga's work than Alston's. I'm starting to fix this. I just read his 1986 JPhil paper "Perceiving God" (I taught it for my class) and was quite impressed. He was arguing for an epistemic parity between cases of belief based on sense perception and belief based on religious experience, and he takes on about eight objections which argue for a disparity. Alston responds either that the objections either make use of a double standard (e.g., both require epistemic circularity to justify themselves as sources of belief) or do not point out an epistemic disparity. I hope to read the book Perceiving God some day soon.

Here's the point of this post. I was wondering if readers of this blog knew some of the key works in philosophy that critically respond to Alston's claims to parity. I'm also interested in knowing what the best critical responses to Alston's religious epistemology work are in general. I know that for any well known book, there are your little articles here and there, but I'm most interested in the ones that have actually been influential. Thanks!

Garry Gutting has a nice piece on faith and philosophy in a recent New York Times article. An excerpt:

The standard view is that philosophers' disagreements over arguments about God make their views irrelevant to the faith of ordinary believers and non-believers. The claim seems obvious: if we professionals can't agree among ourselves, what can we have to offer to non-professionals? An appeal to experts requires consensus among those experts, which philosophers don't have.

This line of thought ignores the fact that when philosophers disagree it is only about specific aspects of the most subtle and sophisticated versions of arguments for and against God's existence (for example, my colleague Alvin Plantinga's modal-logic formulation of St. Anselm's ontological argument or William Rowe's complex version of a probabilistic argument from evil). There is no disagreement among philosophers about the more popular arguments to which theists and atheists typically appeal: as formulated, they do not prove (that is, logically derive from uncontroversial premises) what they claim to prove. They are clearly inadequate in the judgment of qualified professionals. Further, there are no more sophisticated formulations that theists or atheists can accept -- the way we do scientific claims -- on the authority of expert consensus.

In these popular debates about God's existence, the winners are neither theists nor atheists, but agnostics -- the neglected step-children of religious controversy, who rightly point out that neither side in the debate has made its case. This is the position supported by the consensus of expert philosophical opinion.

Those with an interest in social epistemology might find some of Gutting's comments of particular interest. Thanks to Stephen Grimm for passing this along.

Sometimes I wish I lived in the UK. I can't imagine such a rational and fair discussion airing in the states, not even on NPR maybe.

Interview on Australian ABC affiliate.

Article in the Guardian on the old "New Atheists."

Morris's cool book _Inevitable Humans_.

A summary of some of his ideas from Wikipedia.

Simon Conway Morris's homepage in the Department of Earth Sciences, Cambridge U.

He's well known for his work on evolutionary convergence, the fact that certain features seem to evolve independently and almost inevitably. This has lead him to make the controversial claim--for which he however makes a good case based on the convergence data he's famous for in his field--that if there were life on other planets, it wold likely resemble life on Earth to a remarkable degree.

There are two potential applications of his work (at least) concerning the design argument. One is that it would settle a dilemma posed in this paper by Dougherty and Poston: "A User's Guide to Design Arguments." I.e. it would show that there is possibly a good fine-tuning argument for God's existence, but not a good biological design argument.

Second, it would go some way toward defeating the "strange alternative forms of life" objection to the fine-tuning argument.

I welcome both these results.

In my previous post "Non-skeptical Skeptical Theism?", discussion made a bit more clear what I'm trying to say. At least it's enough more clear to be more clear on what's not clear (since not only is there much we know we don't know but much we don't know we don't know, coming to know you don't know something can be important progress, no?).

So I'll try to lay this out a bit more carefully if for no other reason than to highlight the unclarity of what remains unclear.

Let a justifying reason R for some bad state E be the proposition that E occurring is necessary for some greater good or to prevent some equally bad or worse evil.

Let an inscrutable evil be an evil for which we can think of no plausible justifying reason.

H = That horrendous evil occurred (ostending some horrendous evil).

I = There is some inscrutable evil.

T = Theism is true.

Here is what I think is an edict of Common Sense (note the caps!).

(T1) Pr(I/T) = not too low or quite high

Let CST be the thesis that (T1) is an edict of Common Sense.

I'm asserting--for the purposes of this post--CST.

Skeptical theists usually assert certain skeptical theses concerning some sort fall in human knowledge. It has always seemed to me that much the same result can be achieved without the skepticism. Here's a first approximation at a general principle of confirmation:

G If H predicts E, then, c.p. observing E doesn't disconfirm H.

Now let H = theism, E = approx: "There are evils we couldn't think of a reason for."

It seems to me that theism predicts or at least doesn't make very improbable that we would observe evils we can't think of a reason for.

Now, it might seem that this value of E depends upon some skeptical theses. Maybe that's true (so I should call it "Less-skeptical Skeptical Theism"), but I'm not sure what they are. E just seems pretty clearly true to me. I suspect it must have *something* to do with cognitive limitations, but I don't see that I have to fill in just how it's supposed to work because E just seems clearly true on it's own. Maybe E', "Life is really really complicated, and we have pretty limited resources" is enough to support E. It seems to me to be so.

If I'm right about that, then I'm going to be in better shape with this defense than with standard skeptical theism because standard skeptical theists skeptical theses don't seem to me to get them with they want, or if they do I don't like them for other reasons (like they get them too much!).

I'm not at all sure about this, just a hunch taking shape.