Recently in Religious Belief Category

This is the last installment of the Prosblogion Reading Group. I've found reading these posts and comments edifying, and I hope the rest of the readers have as well. I'd like to thank Matthew for setting this up, and for the other participants--both posters and commenters--for their great thoughts.

Below I discuss Tooley's response to Plantinga's response to Tooley. Or, put another way, Tooley's "Yes way!" to Plantinga's "No way!" To keep my comments at a manageable length I've referred back to Trent and Andrew's posts, rather than presenting the whole dialectic here. But I've tried to summarize the dialectic briefly in most places. For more detail on the original argument or Plantinga's response, be sure to see the discussions of the last two weeks.

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews today published William Rowe's review of Plantinga & Tooley's Knowledge of God. A remarkably nice bit of timing on the part of NDPR!

Welcome to the Knowledge of God Prosblogion reading group! Each week, we will read a section of the book, and the section breakdown and ordering is as follows:
C. 1 (1-30), C. 1 (30-69), C. 4, C. 5, C. 2 (70-108), C. 2 (108-150), C. 3, C. 6.

Each Monday, a different Prosblogion contributor will write an opening post. Other contributors can post on that section two or three days later in the week. Everybody is welcome to read along in the book and comment.

It's a pleasure to kick-off all the fun. Let me summarize the main claims that I take Plantinga to argue for in my section.

I) If God exists, then it is likely that many people know that God exists.
II) If Christian belief is true, then it is likely that many people know that it is true.
III) If naturalism is true, then no biological organs function properly or improperly.

Plantinga's defends (I) and (II) as follows:

In his "Reasonable Religious Disagreements" Richard Feldman uses the principle that "Evidence of evidence is evidence" (lets call it EEE) to argue that (very roughly) one can't use one's own private experience as a way to settle disagreement with an epistemic peer."

Here's a test case you and I are looking out across a field and I (honestly) claim to see a sheepdog about 10 yards off. You say you don't see any such thing. There is nothing in the vicinity with which to confuse the sheepdog, it's fairly bright day, I have (antecedent) reason to believe your eyes are functioning properly, etc. Some would say (and van Inwagen seems to say) that the fact that my view still seems to me to be true after I consider your disagreement, then that persistent belief is justified.

Rich says this can't be because I know that *your* view seems true to *you* and I have no reason to think you are more prone to error than me. He uses EEE to urge this for he says that your statement that you don't see it is evidence that you've had an experience the veridicality of which would entail that I am in error. Thus I have evidence that I am in error.

So far so good, but I don't think it follows from this that I am unreasonable to maintain my belief. Rather, I think a conclusion more like that of Christensen 2007 is correct: that I ought to revise my belief down in light of this new evidence.

I'll continue the discussion below the fold.

It's a special issue on the Ethics of Belief. [LINK: requires subscription] TOC beneath the fold.

If the link comes up all messy it's because I'm still figuring out the new system when it comes to HTML. [Edited by MM]

Here is an example of some reasoning that should be of interest to philosophers of religion. We don't have a complete science of the brain yet, but look at what recent neuro-science has shown. Don't the recent successes of neuro-science give us good reason to believe that there will one day be adequate evidence for the proposition that the brain is completely scientifically explainable. Shouldn't we then now think that the brain is completely scientifically explainable?

I think many would find something like the above reasoning plausible. I have to admit I find it plausible, and there are a few other kinds of arguments out there in philosophy that make a similar kind of move.

But here is where I start to get worried. For these strategies to work, something like the following principle must be true.

(1) If S is justified in believing that at some future time S will be justified in believing P, then S is justified in believing P now.

However, this won't do. I am justified in believing that, at some future time, I will be justified in believing that my dog is dead. After all, I'm pretty sure my dog isn't immortal. That doesn't mean I'm justified in believing that my dog is dead now. We might think there is a quick fix that can get around this.

I was asked by several people to comment on a post by Bill V on his blog which raised the question whether one can be a philosopher and a Catholic.  I am drowning under deadlines so I haven't had a chance to look at it.  However, I have addressed the question on my Catholic blog and thought some readers might be interested.  I posted it there rather than hear because I don't have time to put the thoughts carefully and I feel less need to do that on my own personal blog.  Also, the point could hinge on a piece of Catholic dogma, so it might not be ecumenical enough for here anyway.

One of the things for which Hinduism is most well-known for among Westerners is its claim to catholicity.  This view is usually associated with Advaita VedÄ?nta, which posits a purely noumenal being, Brahman, behind the phenomena of experiencing God, Dhamma, etc. in all the world’s religions. The late 9^th century Kashmiri Jayanta however gives a strictly theistic defense of religious inclusivism in his play Ä€gamaá¸?ambara (“Much Ado About Religion”).  I give a brief sketch here of Jayanta’s arguments, as well as a discussion of the relevance they might have to contemporary debates.

At the risk of readers thinking I've lost my marbles, let me just say that as I take work-breaks in this intense summer of study and teaching (three summer classes is harder than five semester classes) I like to let my mind wander far and wide.

In two of my classes this summer I asked students to tell me--anonymously on a piece of paper--the thing which they would most like to know.  If they could find out the answer to just one question, what would that question be?

To my surprise, in one class fully half the class wanted most to know whether there was life on other planets.  In one of the little anthologies of Lewis's essays\ there's one entitled, as I recall, "Of Religion and Rocketry" (which, as I recall, Hooper states in his introduction the original publisher insisted calling "Onward Christian Spaceman").

At the time of my reading this--junior in High School--I was hard-pressed by a teacher who really pressed the verificationist line and told me that my religious assertions were meaningless (literally) unless I could cite something that would constitute evidence against them.  One item I came up with was the discovery of (intelligent) life on other planets (and maybe non-intelligent life).

Lewis's essay changed my mind about that (for the most part).  So, I do recommend the essay and I'm very interested in others reactions to this both immediate and then reflective.  Would you have taken such a discover in itself to be counter-evidence?  What about now that you've thought about it a bit?  Are there any particulars of such a discovery that could affect it's evidential status?  Whatcha think?

There's been lots of discussion in the previous post about canonicity.  Which books are the inspired books that God has given to his church?  We want a canon that contains all and only the inspired texts.  Only inspired texts, so that we aren't led astray by phonies; all inspired texts, so that we aren't missing something vital.  

But, how is the Christian supposed to know which canon is the right one?  The Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants all have different canons, and that's just mentioning the three most common canons.  There are many other professed canons out there.  How does the Christian know which to affirm?  

What sorts of things could justify the Christian in judging /this/ canon to be all and only God's word?  I'm not asking (yet) for the whole story; I'm asking a more general question.  What sorts of justification /could/ do the work here?

More below the fold.

The June issue of Religious Studies (try this link or this RSS feed depending on your access) is out and in it is the paper Ted and I wrote together on Divine Hiddenness (with a, um, a rather terse reply by Schellenberg).

Thanks to those of you who workshopped that paper with us!

Last week someone forwarded me an interesting article I thought I'd share. The article was an interview from the most recent issue of Biblical Archaeology Review titled "Losing Faith: How Scholarship Affects Scholars".In the piece, editor Hershel Shanks interviews familiar figures such as Bart Ehrman on how their scholarship has affected their faith and particularly the loss of faith. The interview isn't particularly philosophical—none of those interviewed is a professional philosopher—though James Strange does give it the old college try. However, I thought some readers would find the interview interesting because it mirrors something that seems to sometimes take place in philosophical circles. Even in my own limited experience I've met a number of people who entered our discipline as theists and left as atheists. In several of these cases graduate studies in philosophy only narrowly beat out a stint in seminary, and for some few it followed on seminary. In fact my first philosophy professor falls into the later category.