Assorted Replies to the Faith, Reason, and Believing the Bible is the Word of God Discussion

Tentative Apologist: "I have just completed a two day jaunt in the mountains and am now deep in the wilds of southern British Columbia (the westernmost Canadian province). Hence, the radio silence for the last couple days. I offer here scattered replies to the discussion in The Tentative Apologist Reader on Faith and Reason. I will catch up with other discussions in the coming days and then hopefully begin again on reviewing The Christian Delusion soon enough."

Silver Bullet: "It is my understanding that Alvin Plantinga, the most influential modern Christian philosopher of religion, developed his ideas on warrant and properly basic Christian beliefs (ie. warranted Christian beliefs without need for evidence), because he felt that evidential approaches and other philosophical arguments for rational Christian belief simply do not succeed."

Tentative Apologist: "That's a legend that atheists tell each other around the campfire. Read the introduction to the 1990 edition of God and Other Minds. Plantinga explains how he recognized that philosophers arbitrarily demanded a higher degree of proof concerning belief in God than other beliefs and this was simply indefensible.

"As Plantinga argued in that book, there are no proofs for the existence of other minds. But the fact is that our justification for believing in the existence of minds other than our own does not depend on the philosopher's proof to begin with. In fact, belief in other minds is properly basic absent defeaters.

"From this starting point Plantinga's epistemology examines the many other areas where beliefs are properly basic absent defeaters - rational intuition, sense perception, memory, testimony - and has argued that there is no defensible reason to exclude belief in God (or specific beliefs about God) from that class of belief. This means that while arguments for/against God's existence (or for/against specific properties of God) can strengthen justification or defeat it, they are not necessary to justify belief absent the presence of defeaters."

Tentative Apologist: "Now for Sorceror's comments. First, Sorceror bless you! You actually took the time to go back and interact with my old posts." Blush. "Unfortunately I don't agree with your criticism. (Surprised?) Let's begin with rational intuition. I critiqued a stipulative criterion that says knowledge is limited to those beliefs which can only be denied on pain of contradiction. That's an extraordinarily high level. But you defended this when you wrote: ‘Things that can't be denied without contradiction are, by that very property, certain. They "cannot not be true". And if that isn't knowledge, I dunno what is.' But I'm not denying that logically true axioms are knowledge. I am claiming that there is no reason to believe those are the only type of knowledge. And to claim they are is contradictory since, as I said, that stipulation can be denied without contradiction and thus the criterion, if true, cannot be justifiably believed.

"You also write: ‘truth isn't a binary value - it's a probability range.' I think you mean to say that knowledge is a probability range. A statement is either true or it is not. (Further qualifications for those who care: there are statements that are closer to the truth than others. The statement ‘There are one million people on the earth' is closer to the truth than the statement ‘There are two people on the earth' but neither is ultimately true. However in certain contexts a statement may be true given the conventions of what is an acceptable approximation. You ask me what my salary is. I say ‘a hundred thousand bucks.' I may actually make $101,675 but that is an acceptable convention and thus true. But if given as a statement to Revenue Canada [or the IRS] it would be false.)

"Sorceror also took issue with my view on the proper basicality of sense perception: ‘Seeing an apple is not a unitary, atomic operation. It is an elaborate and complex process with multiple stages and judgement calls. It is "a second order inference from basic experience", though that inference is almost entirely unconscious.' I agree that vision and other senses are extraordinarily complex but that statement ‘inference is almost entirely unconscious' is a crucial concession. It is simply false to claim that people experience a sense datum and then infer ‘Hmm, I am being appeared to redly. I will infer as a provisional hypothesis that there is a red delicious apple in front of me.'

"Now we turn from epistemology in general to the Bible with our final two comments."

beetle496: "Can you provide a non-controversial example of a claim (besides rational intuition and sensory experiences) which ‘could possibly be (a) among the set of p's which do not require evidence to be reasonably believed or known or (b) among the set of p's which could be known or reasonably believed based on evidence which may be inaccessible to others'? I believe you offered ‘my spouse loves me' before, but most of us here did not find that compelling nor in any way are feelings comparable to religious claims (except maybe the belief that ‘Jesus loves me')."

Tentative Apologist: "First, I cannot resist this observation. Right wing think tank the Heritage Foundation invites Marxist political G.A. Cohen (alas, before he was deceased) to come deliver an address on ‘non-controversial examples of socialism at work.' What's the likelihood that the Heritage Foundation will agree that whatever examples Cohen would provide are indeed non-controversial examples? Don't wait up!

"Now on to your demand. Memory is an obvious example. We know an extraordinary amount through memory. It helps us on the way to work every day, for example. I drive the same way I remember driving the day before, and the day before that. I trust my memory until defeaters start appearing that it is becoming faulty (e.g. I forget how to get to work) at which point I might be tested for dementia. But until evidence arises that my memory is untrustworthy, I am fully justified in accepting its deliverances as properly basic."

beetle496: "There is also the rather significant problem that just because something falls into (a) or (b), it does not follow that it is actually true. We also discussed how easy it to fool our senses and intuitions when it comes to things that are very large, very small, or moving very fast. Do you have any good examples?"

Tentative Apologist: "No, it doesn't mean that it is true. The wise epistemological position to take is fallibilism. Virtually any one of our beliefs could be false, except perhaps a small number of logical axioms (assuming we prescind the possibility of Descartes's evil demon or a naturalistic equivalent). This means that even if a belief is properly basic, we should always be on the lookout for defeating evidence, especially if that belief is of very high existential import like belief in or disbelief in God."

beetle496: "I am also looking forward to your explanation of how "God belief is properly basic" equates to "Christianity is properly basic". I believe you when you say that the former is a genuine feeling of yours. Please show me that anything beyond that isn't just cultural.

Tentative Apologist: "As Plantinga points out, what is properly basic is not typically the belief that God exists, but rather beliefs about God which imply/entail God's existence. I am not sure what this means: ‘Please show me that anything beyond that isn't just cultural.' But I would point you to the analogy with idealism in the links provided. There isn't any sensory experience that requires the postulation of a world of extended substance (i.e. no experience that supports realism about the world as beyond anything more than 'culture') but you believe in it anyway."

AnAtheist.Net: "I care about why a non-believer such as myself should have reason to think that the Bible is anything more than an ancient collection of human literature."

Tentative Apologist: "I'm appreciative for MGT2's efforts on this score but my approach might be a bit different. I would begin not with evidences that the Bible is inspired but rather with the claim that Jesus rose and work out from there. AAN, you and I have worked through some of these evidences in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5. You were not persuaded but many others have been. We have documentary evidence that within months of the purported events Christians in Jerusalem believed that Jesus had been raised because of (1) an empty tomb and (2) posthumous citings. Indeed, those are the reasons they give for being Christians to begin with. It is easy to come up with a facile dismissal of the evidence (e.g. ‘Yeah, and people have seen Elvis too') but I would simply direct skeptics to spend time actually looking at the evidence and the various alternative hypotheses that sceptics have offered for the last two hundred years (e.g. various admixtures of swoon theory, conspiracy, wrong tomb and legend).

"Of course after this study, you may still remain unconvinced of the resurrection. (Though I hope you wouldn't at that point indulge yourself in trite Elvis comparisons.) But personal incredulity is not necessarily a ground to think the evidence is poor here anymore than it is a reason to think the arguments for socialist economics are weak because of the Heritage Foundation's scepticism."