Belief in Yahweh in a world of other gods

[Note to the reader: this is the third installment in an ongoing conversation on the rationality of belief in God. We now join this conversation, which is unfolding at a bohemian coffee shop, in progress.]

The college guy was looking impatient. "Can you get to the question at hand? Good gosh man, people are beginning to fall asleep!"

"Yes, yes," Randal said hurriedly. "On to the first challenge to faith: the undercutting defeater. As I said, a defeater is a challenge to one's belief. Let's say that I believe it is sunny today. You could challenge this belief by pulling back the curtains and revealing an overcast sky and a light drizzle. As a result of that evidence, I cannot rationally believe that it is sunny any longer. Your action would thus serve as a defeater for my belief."

"Okay, okay we get it! Quit stalling man!" the mathematician snarled. "We're not interested in defeaters to the weather. We want to hear about the defeaters to Christian belief!"

"All right, all right!" barked Randal. "I'll talk about a couple major undercutting defeaters and explain why I don't think they're successful. First let's identify the Christian belief that faces alleged defeat:

(1) Yahweh is the most perfect being (that is God).

"The issue is whether the Christian has to worry about an undercutting defeater to (1). In order to set up the first defeater to (1), let's return to my earlier example. You walk to the coffee shop expecting to meet Juan, a fellow you've never seen before. The plan is that he will wear a black Democracy Now! T-shirt so that you can identify him. When you walk into the coffee shop, you initially see one guy and he is wearing a black Democracy Now! T-shirt. As a result, you conclude that he is Juan.

"This is like the Christian who initially is taught Christian belief and concludes that (1) is true. Both your belief that the guy is Juan and the Christian's belief that (1) is true, appear to be initially justified.

"But then as you walk further into the coffee shop, you see a couple dozen other guys with the same T-shirt. Clearly this discovery undercuts your initial justification to believe that the first guy you saw is Juan. It is not that the discovery of other guys wearing the shirt directly refutes your assumption that the first guy is Juan. But it does undercut your ground to believe he is.

"Similarly, once the Christian discovers that most other people deny (1), this discovery serves as an undercutting defeater for belief in (1). It is not that (1) is proven false, but rather that a person has no more reason to believe (1) than the visitor to the coffee shop has a reason to believe the first guy he saw is Juan. So it would seem that the Christian's belief that Yahweh is the most perfect being is arbitrary, and so unjustified."

[Incidentally the argument applies to those who start off as Christians with no initial awareness of other religious belief systems. Consequently, their belief was initially justified but is no longer. By contrast, according to this argument those who start with an awareness of other belief systems would never have had justified belief in (1) because that belief would always have been arbitrary.]