Jobar

Thus, I think it's reasonable to ask, what evidence for theism would you take as being sufficient. Put another way, what evidence would cause you to move from atheism to theism?

This is a fairly common question in this forum; I've seen many possible answers that all boil down to the observable universe would have to be vastly different from the way it is. For instance, if everyone who professed belief in God gave closely similar descriptions of what God wanted of humanity, and if there was one commonly accepted set of scriptures, and if there was clear and consistent advantage accruing to those who professed belief, that would be a good start. (There would still be problems, mind you, but those problems would concern the *nature* of God and not his existence.)

In the world we actually live in, the concept of a god- in particular, a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent one- is violently self-contradictory.

bd-from-kg

Kenny:

No problem. But keep in mind that this was originally a debate between Kuyper and me, and Kuyper is still “in the field”, so to speak, so I see no reason to cease and desist quite yet. So here goes. (Unfortunately I don't have time to polish this up; it looks a bit disconnected if one doesn't refer to our last two posts.)

Aside from the fact that you should replace “the universe” with “our experiences” and “physical” with “natural”, that’s probably close enough. But I was perhaps being a bit sloppy in referring to what I was talking about as metaphysical naturalism. What I had in mind was not a doctrine that positively asserts that our experiences are explicable solely in terms of an impersonal set of natural laws, but an ontology (in the sense I defined) which interprets our experiences solely in these terms. The difference is that such an ontology doesn’t assert anything at all about what else might exist; the fact that it doesn’t include anything else is justified by the fact that nothing else is needed to explain any observations or experiences. This is not a metaphysical theory.

Yes, yes. I don’t understand why the universe exists either. Fortunately it appears that there’s no need to answer this question (if it’s a real question at all) in order to build a conceptual framework that allows me to interpret and understand my experiences and predict future ones. What’s more, I know of no way that I can obtain evidence relevant to this question. The rational stance in this kind of situation is to modestly admit that I don’t know and to neither advance nor accept any hypothesis whatever about it. Your implicit assumption that puny human reason is capable of penetrating such mysteries, or even of coming to any meaningful (non-tautological) conclusions about them, strikes me as absurdly prideful.

Yup. Pretty silly, isn’t it? Just as silly as the MN analogue.

Ontological parsimony also demands that we not make up explanations just for the sake of having an explanation.

Of course it does. The fact that it asserts that the nature of the natural world is different from what MN asserts is irrelevant. A theistic ontological framework is clearly more complex than a “plain-vanilla” naturalistic one.

Sure, but that’s just theism as such; not a theistic ontology (in my sense). If it’s going to be capable of interpreting and predicting our experiences (which is the purpose and function of an ontology after all) a theistic ontology must include a lot more than that. My point is not that as a metaphysical theory about the fundamental nature of reality theism is more complicated than MN, but that a theistic ontology is necessarily more complex than a naturalistic one.

OK, if you can show that the existence of the natural world logically entails the existence of God, I’ll concede.

OK, if you can demonstrate that nothing outside of God can exist apart from the will and sustaining power of God, I’ll again concede that the existence of anything at all entails the existence of God. And I’ll even further concede that a theistic ontology is no more complex than a naturalistic one.

All experiences of all humans can be interpreted in terms of a straightforward naturalistic ontology that does not include leprechauns, demonic possession, astral influences on human affairs, telepathy, or God. That’s what it means to say that it appears on the surface that none of these things exist. To justify belief in any of these things in evidential terms, you have to show that there are experiences that cannot be plausibly interpreted in terms of an ontology that excludes them. That was my point. Adding “God” to a naturalistic ontology is a radical modification, and it adds zero to its explanatory or predictive power.

Quite so. There is no rational justification for asserting that the natural world is the whole of reality. But there is an excellent rational reason for refusing to accept any specific assertion to the effect that there’s something more (especially if that “something more” has radical implications regarding the nature of the natural world, our own natures, etc.) Namely, the fact that there’s no evidence that there’s something more. Certainly no evidence of any specific “something more”.

Sure. But all this is just the very high-level, abstract stuff. When you get around to “filling in the details” sufficiently to be able to interpret and predict actual experiences, a theistic ontology has to add a lot of specific premises of the kind I described. “God exists” simply does not entail “the electroweak force exists”.

Oh, come one. Just because one can invent a simple name for something, it doesn’t mean that it’s “simple”. For example, one hypothesis explaining why most people believe that no one is being abducted by aliens is that there’s a worldwide conspiracy to suppress the evidence and persuade people that it isn’t so. But the fact that this hypothesis can be described by the simple word “conspiracy” doesn’t make it “simple”. In reality it’s ridiculously complicated. The hypothesis that one’s future can be predicted by reading one’s palm is “simple” – until one realizes how many incredibly complicated things would have to be true for this to be so.

Similarly, the assertion that God is omniscient may seem disarmingly simple at first blush, until we stop to reflect on what it would mean for a being to be omniscient. It would mean that He has an infinite “database” of information – in fact, its size would have to exceed any cardinality (which is vast indeed). And then there must be some sort of mechanism (not physical presumably, but I don’t know of any adequate word) to “search” this database (at infinite speed of course) to retrieve any desired information. There must be a “central processor” of some kind capable of correlating infinite amounts of information instantaneously (or at least in a finite amount of time – and when one is dealing with infinities the difference is essentially nonexistent). And so on. The “omniscience and “omnibenevolence” properties similarly imply vast, incredibly complicated capabilities which must be realized somehow. This is what I mean by saying that the God hypothesis is infinitely complex. These “simple” words cover a heck of a lot of ground.

I don’t know, I kind of thought that this was the debate we are currently engaged in. (This strand of it anyway.)

To the extent that MN tries to answer unanswerable questions, I agree.

The point is that there is no rational reason to think that it’s a fundamental category. Nothing in our actual experience suggests that it is.

Even if consciousness is really fundamentally nonphysical, it’s still part of the natural world (at least all instances of it that we know of are).

This is a misunderstanding of what I was trying to get at. It’s true that lots of things can’t really be understood without what I call “high-level” interpretations. But obviously these interpretations are still founded on the fundamental natural laws. Change these, and the behavior of what’s being explained will change. The point is that an emergent phenomenon cannot reasonably be considered a category of fundamental reality. There’s no rational reason to expect it to “emerge” elsewhere out of nowhere, with no physical or other substrate to emerge from.

Sure. Perhaps. But there’s no rational reason to suppose that this is so. The fact that you can imagine that something is so isn’t a reason to believe that it is so. Look, I have a perfectly reasonable naturalistic explanation of why we tend to think in a certain way. The way this works is, if there’s a straightforward naturalistic explanation for something a supernatural explanation is out of court.

In some cases that may be true (although the more I learn the harder I find it to come up with any case that I would consider clearly valid). But when it comes to intuitions on subjects that have little or no relevance to survival or the propagation of our genes (i.e., really fundamental things like the nature of space and time, matter and energy, and the like), there seems to be little if any correspondence between our intuitions and the true nature of things. And this is exactly what evolutionary theory predicts. So at the very least this claim would have to be bolstered by some very strong arguments to make it plausible.

I’ll be talking more about this in a forthcoming post.

God’s revelation? And what would that be now? The Bible? Or your own intuitions? Christians have an annoying habit of attributing beliefs that they can’t justify rationally to “divine revelation”.

At any rate, since reliance on divine revelation is clearly not part of the basic “rational strategy”, it would have to be justified via this strategy before it could be considered rational.

We don’t seem to be able to agree on anything these days. Although Kuyper’s original post that started this strand of the debate might have been off-topic, your argument here, as I understand it, is that a theistic ontology is at least as parsimonious as a non-theistic one. If this were true, it would show that accepting theism without any evidence (i.e., independently of any evidence for it) is indeed perfectly rational. But I’m happy to break off this strand for now, since like you I have my hands full with the “main debate”, and this is distracting me from it to some extent.

rainbow walking

(Hi Kuyper)...that Platinga, and you, are launching an argument that the foundational attributes of ones ontology needn't be rational or supported with "sufficient evidence" to justify ones beliefs?

I ask this in response to what you said here:

My argument is, yes. In this respect, I agree with Plantinga's project in his "Warrented Christian Belief". But even he points out that his argument isn't intended to prove God exists. Rather, it is intended to say that belief in God doesn't require evidence to be rational. Plantinga's challenge is to the evidentialist's claim that only those beliefs that have "sufficient evidence" can be rational. In a nutshell, the response is that the belief that that requirement is necessary is itself lacking sufficient evidence, so is self-refuting.

It took Plantinga 500+ pages to get there, but that is, I think, the essence of his argument. But on its own, it isn't meant as an argument to demonstrate that God exists.


Why should one accept irrational claims as evidences sufficient to justify a radical departure from ones ontological perspectives?

Metaphysical naturalism is derived from scientifically established evidences that are rational. Why should one step off such a solid foundation into the ethereal goo of theism whose assertions subsist on claims that neither evidence nor rationality can be found among its ingredients?

bd-from-kg

Kuyper:

Jobar has given an adequate answer to this. But I think that even the kind of evidence he’s talking about would not be sufficient. In fact, I’m inclined to think that no evidence at all that could be accessible to beings like us would be sufficient. The problem is that the “God hypothesis” postulates an infinite cause as an explanation for finite effects. I don’t see how that can ever be justified. Finite effects can always be explained in terms of finite hypotheses.

Of course, Kenny’s argument that it’s more reasonable to postulate an infinite “ultimate ground of being” than a finite one seems plausible. But this is quite a different thing from inferring God’s existence from evidence. What would evidence of an “ultimate ground of being” even look like? How could we know that any evidence whatever didn’t have a finite cause?

I haven’t lost sight of that. This strand grew out of my argument that absence of evidence for God rationally demands strong disbelief in His existence (which of course is a position on the original question). You and Kenny have been disputing that. Both of you seem to be arguing that in the absence of evidence, belief in God is just as rational as disbelief.

Yes, this is where the logic of your (and Kenny’s) argument seems to lead: that it’s rational to believe in God, not only in the absence of any evidence, but in the absence of any argument that He exists. IMHO, this is loony tunes.

This is a confusion of categories. It’s impossible in principle to give evidence (i.e., empirical evidence) showing that basic metaphysical commitments regarding how to interpret our experiences are “true” or “valid”. What the “evidentialist” is saying is that it’s irrational to add an element to one’s ontology – especially one quite different from existing elements - unless there’s evidence that cannot be interpreted more simply without doing so. This “belief” is not itself an element of one’s ontology, but part of a methodology for creating or modifying an ontology. Anyway, it’s self-evident that it’s a principle of rationality itself that one should not believe in the existence of an entity without evidence. Moreover, I’ve offered two arguments for this principle. First, it “falls out” immediately from my exposition of the nature of rationality. Second, the existence of an entity is necessarily an element of one’s ontology, and it’s immediately apparent from the nature and purpose of an ontology that adding elements that complicate it without adding explanatory or predictive power is inappropriate – it tends to defeat its purpose, or at best does nothing to help it accomplish its purpose. (These are actually the same argument expressed in two different ways, or as seen from two different vantage points.)

bd-from-kg

Kenny:

For technical reasons I’ve chosen to reply to your Jan. 31 posts in reverse order. Thus this post is a reply to the second one.

1. Rational justification and warrant.

It’s easy to confuse the notions of rational justification and warrant. What Gettier showed was that it’s possible to have a true, rationally justified belief yet not have knowledge. And an analysis of his examples seems to show that our conception of “knowledge” seems to involve some kind of relationship between the reasons for the belief and the state of affairs that make that belief true; it’s the fact that such a relationship is absent that makes us say that the people in his examples don’t really “know” even though they have justified true beliefs (JTB’s). As you said some time ago, the concept of “warrant” is intended to bridge the gap between JTB and knowledge:

Two things fall out of this immediately: (1) “Warrant” is supposed to be a stronger concept than justified belief in the sense that any belief that has warrant should, as a matter of logical necessity, also be rationally justified; (2) A belief can be rationally justified without being warranted; otherwise there would be no point in inventing a new term.

The difference between the two, of course, is supposed to lie in the additional requirement that (in the case of true beliefs at least) the reasons for the belief must have the “right” relationship to the reasons why it is true (i.e., the state of affairs that makes it true). But we have no way to tell (in general at any rate) whether this “right relationship” exists. It seems to me that having a justified true belief inherently involves having a justified belief that such a relationship exists, but that doesn’t insure that it does. (Any of the Gettier examples will illustrate this.) Thus, while it is of some philosophical interest to analyze exactly what relationship must hold between the reasons for a belief and the reason it is true in order for the belief to qualify as “knowledge”, it’s really of no practical interest, nor does it really have anything to do with rationality per se.

At any rate, I had no intention of trying to solve the knotty problem of coming up with an adequate conception of “warrant”, or in other words of solving the Gettier problem. (Lots of better philosophers than I have tried to do this and failed.) In fact, I didn’t really try to define a concept of “warrant” at all. So it’s hardly surprising that my analysis is not “sufficient for a characterization of warrant”; I was never under the delusion that it was. In fact, I’d have no real quarrel with Plantinga’s criterion if the only problem with it were that it is an “insufficient characterization of warrant”. It’s true that I thought it worthwhile to point out that it fails utterly to identify anything that could be considered a plausible candidate for the “right relationship” needed to resolve the Gettier problem. But the main problem I have with it (in the context of a discussion of the rationality of theistic beliefs) is that it fails to meet even the minimal test of being a stronger concept than rational justification; that is, it’s possible for a belief to be “warranted” in Plantinga’s sense without being rationally justified. This is important, because Plantinga essentially argues that theistic belief is warranted (by showing that it meets his criterion of warrant) and then clearly wants us to draw the seemingly obvious conclusion that it is rationally justified.

2. My interpretation of “rationality”

But before looking again at Plantinga’s criterion, I want to consider your critique of my concept of “rational justification” (which, unlike the concept of “warrant”, I really did try to characterize, at least in broad outline).

You say that the justification I offer for being rational – i.e., for following the “rational strategy” - is essentially pragmatic. It’s not at all clear that this term is properly applicable here. For example, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Pragmatism demands that philosophy grow out of and test its merits in the ‘soil’ of lived experience.” That’s certainly not true here: the strategy of rationality is world-independent – that is, its justification is that it is the best way to interpret or conceptualize our experiences (and predict future ones), and as such must be logically prior to all experience.

In fact, strictly speaking, rationality doesn’t require belief in the principle of induction, etc.; it only requires that one act on certain principles. That is, it demands that one act on the premise that regularities observed in the past will extend into the future, that one’s memory is reliable, etc. But it is humanly impossible to act routinely on such premises without believing them to be true. So in the final analysis the only “pragmatic” part of the rational strategy is that we should not try vainly to resist our minds’ insistence on believing premises that we act on regularly, but should just go ahead and believe them.

I think that this is what Gale was getting at in his interesting paper The Overall Argument of Alston's Perceiving God when he said (in a closely related context):

(Note: The “action” Gale is referring to is trusting the reliability of our senses.)

In other words, unlike all of your examples, accepting the reliability of one’s memory, applying the principle of induction, etc., are not optional. In fact, this sort of thing is the essence of rationality itself. A person who actually rejected the principle of induction, or refused to accept the reliability of his memory, or routinely failed to apply Ockham’s Razor, would not be a skeptic, but a madman; he would quickly be locked up in a loony bin.

So, just what kind of justification can be given for following the “rational strategy”? A rational justification? That would be absurd: transparently circular. No, the only possible justification for being rational – indeed, the only possible justification for any recommendation or decision about “what to do” - is a “pragmatic” one, in the sense that it has to refer to the results it can reasonably be expected to have. So this criticism is no criticism at all.

Accepting (e.g.) the principle of induction isn’t a bit like deciding to believe that you can jump a ravine to escape from a bear in order to increase the likelihood of escaping from the bear. In this case you’re adopting a particular belief for the express purpose of achieving a particular desired result, whereas the point of adopting the rational strategy is to be able to achieve any results at all; it’s not aimed at any specific result.

You say that, while I’ve justified believing in such things, we still don’t know whether they’re true. Gale comments of this as well in the article I quoted from earlier:

As Alston demonstrates ably in Perceiving God, the “philosopher’s doubt” is the kind of doubt to which there is no answer. We simply have to admit that in the final analysis the radical skeptic is right; we could be wrong about pretty much everything. But a rational person will recognize that it’s a waste of time to worry about it; we have no choice but to assume that our beliefs are not systematically wrong in a thoroughgoing way and get on with things.

This can be seen most clearly by considering the most fundamental question of all: “Am I sane?” (Or if you prefer, “Am I rational?”) Of course I think I am; in fact it seems self-evident to me that I am. But I can imagine being completely insane while being perfectly certain that I’m sane. How can I be sure that I’m not in such a state? The answer, of course, is that I can’t. The absurdity of a madman appealing to his fundamental intuitions is too obvious to need explaining. And if (following in Descartes' footsteps) I try to fashion an argument showing that I must necessarily be sane, how can I have any confidence in the validity of the argument without knowing in advance that I can distinguish a valid argument from an invalid one?

But while my approach (like any other) leaves room for “philosophical doubt”, that doesn’t mean that it precludes the possibility of knowledge. Take the example of seeing someone that I take to be Susan in the mall. Am I rationally justified in believing that Susan is in the mall? Yes, obviously. There’s no point in objecting that I’m assuming that my memory is reliable (and that some complex cognitive functions are in good working order for that matter), and that I have no evidence for these things and no “reason” at all in the usual sense to believe them. These assumptions are part of rationality itself. Thus in saying that my belief is rationally justified, I’m saying that I am using these presuppositions (and no other ones) to arrive at my conclusion. That’s what it means to say that a conclusion is rationally justified. Moreover, if (unlike the original example) I really am seeing Susan, my belief is true. Finally, on any reasonable interpretation of “warrant”, my belief is warranted, since my reasons for believing it obviously have the right kind of relationship to the state of affairs that makes it true (namely Susan’s being in the mall). This is the type of paradigm case that serves as a test of a concept of “warrant” to see whether it’s reasonable. In other words, this is precisely the kind of case where we want to say that the belief has “warrant”, and therefore constitutes “knowledge”. Any concept of warrant that says that this belief is not warranted is immediately out of court on that account alone.

Finally, you argue that my account of rationality is flawed because lots of beings who don’t follow the “rational strategy” clearly have rationally justified beliefs:

It’s clear that what you’re really talking about here is rational justification; if you thought that the beliefs in question were rationally justified, you would certainly agree that (in most cases anyway) they are also warranted. But why do you say that they're not rationally justified? Well, because most people (not to mention young children and animals) are unable to articulate or are not consciously aware of the rational strategy that they follow in arriving at these beliefs. But this doesn’t mean that they’re not following a rational strategy. Thus, when my dog hangs around his food tray as din-din time approaches, it’s because I’ve fed him repeatedly at about this time hundreds of times: he’s applying the principle of induction, although he doesn’t realize it. As for people, an example from C.S. Lewis’s Miracles, though intended to make a different point, illustrates this one nicely:

Now even if the “he” in question is a child, we would say that his belief that the dog is dangerous is rational in the first case and irrational in the second. The reason is simply that in the first case it was arrived at by following the rational strategy and in the second case it was not. It simply doesn’t matter whether he can articulate the rational strategy that he followed, or even whether he’s conscious of just how he arrived at this belief. The only thing that matters is how he arrived at it, not whether he understands how he arrived at it – and certainly not whether he can explain just why the procedure by which he arrived at it qualifies as “rational”.

Thus, although it’s true that, as you point out, my account is “neither necessary nor sufficient for an analysis of knowledge” (an analysis that I did not attempt) I see nothing in your comments that even tends to show that it is not a good account of “rational justification” – which is, after all, what we’re talking about in this thread.

3. Plantinga, warrant, and rational justification

Now let’s turn to you discussion of my critique of Plantinga’s conception of “warrant” and its relationship to rational justification.

First off, let’s look at what you have to say about the rationality of the beliefs of RN beings. Recall that I stipulated that they were

You said:

In your latest post you point out that this was in the context of the understanding that:

But I don’t see how this makes any real difference. Obviously a predisposition to believe a given proposition will only tend to produce a true belief in those environments in which the proposition is true. But so what? The term “type of environment” means an environment in which certain propositions are true. How would one go about determining whether a given environment is of a certain “type” other than by determining whether the criteria that define that “type” are met – which is to say, whether the propositions that define it are true?

This brings us to my counterexample of the beings C(n), each of whom is designed to believe a certain proposition P(n) for reasons that have nothing to do with its truth. In the case of C(10,001) this proposition happens to be true. But it will also be true, by definition, in the “type of environment” in which P(10,001) is true. Moreover, it is a simple matter to stipulate that the method by which he is “programmed” carry out his intended function would only work if P(10,001) is true. That is, we can stipulate that his designers hit upon a plan that would work only if P(10,001) is true – which is to say, only in the “type of environment” in which it is true. (They didn’t care about this restriction because they knew that, as a matter of fact, it is true). Thus C(10,001)’s belief forming mechanisms are indeed part of a well designed plan aimed at the production of true beliefs in the type of environment in which he is designed to function.

You seem to be implying that, just as a thermometer cannot reasonably be said to be “working correctly” if its reading has no causal relationship to the actual temperature, so a belief cannot reasonably be said to have warrant unless it has the appropriate causal relationship to the thing the makes it true. I agree with this entirely. And I would take this a step further. A belief cannot be rationally justified unless the person who believes it can rationally believe that the reasons for his belief have an appropriate causal relationship to the state of affairs that makes it true.

But again, a crucial part of Plantinga’s criterion is “in the type of environment in which it is designed to function”. It’s only necessary that the design plan tend to produce true beliefs in this very restricted class of environments. And depending on what the being’s “function” is, this class of environments could include only ones in which certain specific beliefs are true, and the design plan could be tailored to tend to produce those specific beliefs.

If the “designer” is a conscious being this question makes sense, but if it is a natural process the question seems unintelligible. There are myriads of worlds in which the beliefs in question are largely false. It’s highly probable that in most of these worlds the “designer” (i.e., the process that produced the cognitive faculties) doesn’t even exist; in others a process that kinda, sorta resembles it might exist, and in some of these cases these different processes might produce the same beliefs while in others they might produce different ones.

Besides, this question is irrelevant if the worlds in which “the sort of beliefs the cognitive faculties in question were designed to produce” are largely false are worlds in which the being in question cannot function properly.

I really don’t understand this distinction. Isn’t what you’re calling “external rationality” the same thing as “warrant”? In other words, when a being’s beliefs are “internally” rational but not “externally”, isn’t this just another way of saying that it’s beliefs are rationally justified but not warranted?

But more importantly, the term “external rationality” just doesn’t make sense; it’s an oxymoron. A person is rational if he responds to his experiences in a rational way. If he forms reasonable hypotheses about the external world; if he comes to reasonable conclusions to account for his experiences, he is being rational. That’s what it means to be “rational”. If he happens to be wrong through no fault of his own; if his experiences systematically mislead him about the nature of the external world (for example, because he’s in the Matrix), this doesn’t make him irrational in any meaningful sense. That’s the point of the concept of “warrant”. A belief is warranted only if the reasons for it have the right relationship to the state of affairs that makes it true. This is an external relationship. Rationality is an internal state. To say that someone is “rationally justified” is to say that he has acted appropriately in some sense; that he has a “right” to believe what he does based on what he knows. If two beings are presented with exactly the same experiences and arrive at the exact same beliefs in the same way, either both of them have rationally justified beliefs or neither of them do; if the cognitive processes of the one can be described as “rational”, the cognitive processes of the other can also be described as “rational”. Otherwise we are forced to say that whether a belief is rationally justified can depend not only on why the person has the belief but on whether it’s true. But the whole point of the concept of rational justification is to separate these questions; even if we don’t know whether a belief is true we can (often at least) determine whether it is rationally justified.

But if rationality is inherently an internal or intrinsic property of a being, it cannot depend on what world the being happens to find himself in. In other words, it must be “world-independent”.

Thus the problem with defining a belief as warranted “if and only if it is formed through the proper functioning of one’s cognitive faculties which are part of a well designed plan aimed at the production of true beliefs in the type of environment in which those cognitive faculties were designed to function...” is that this is not sufficient even to make a belief rationally justified, much less warranted. (And as I pointed out a while back, “warrant” is supposed to be a stronger condition than rational justification; “Belief X is warranted” must entail “Belief X is rationally justified”. If not the whole discussion of warrant is irrelevant to the current discussion anyway.). To be rationally justified, a belief must be the product of a belief forming mechanism “aimed” at the production of true beliefs, period. It may not succeed in all worlds, but it cannot be tailored to the particular world (or type of world) that the agent happens to be in. Otherwise we end up being forced to say of two beings who are presented with exactly the same experiences and arrive at the exact same beliefs in the same way, that one of them has rationally justified beliefs and the other doesn’t.

I’d like to say more, especially about why beliefs that result from a “designed-in” predisposition to them can never be rationally justified, but I’m out of time for now, and this post is already long enough.

Whew. This is taking a long time, and it’s making my head hurt.

ReasonableDoubt

This is interesting- in the legal world, "warrant" basically means:

b: to serve as or give adequate reason or authorization for
Example: {h,2}warranted the awarding of attorney's fees
Example: was not {h,2}warranted by the facts

(And of course, there are the "warranties" that are given as assurances that some state of affairs actually exist- warranty of title, warranty of ability to contract, warranty of merchantibility, etc.)

If a judge is issuing a warrant, a police officer must swear that the facts presented are true. The warrant, then is actually a document that says, the facts as presented, IF TRUE, create probable cause.

So at least in this world, the fact comes before the circumstances. The facts are established first, and then the combination of facts is analyzed to see whether they "warrant" the conclusion.

However, you don't have to have the facts proven first. It's basically- the facts if proven, warrant this conclusion. The facts can be hypothetical. A belief is warranted only if the facts, if true, or if believed, justify the conclusion.

So is the theist saying that the belief in God's existence is warranted because if we said certain things about the state of the world, the conclusion that God exists would be true?

Kenny

Thanks bd-from-kg,

I await the rest of your response. In the mean time, I tried your Gale link and it didn't work. Perhaps the site is temporarily down, but if the link is broken, could you please fix it?

God Bless,
Kenny

Kenny

No. The argument is not that belief in God is warranted just because we might say that certain states of affairs in the world are true. The argument is that if God exists, then it is likely that the state of affairs in the world are such that belief in God is warranted for many of its adherents in a properly basic manner. On the other hand, if God does not exist, then belief in God is likely not warranted for any of its adherents in a properly basic manner (and probably not warranted for any believer at all). In other words, because of the very nature of theistic belief, the question of the rationality of theism cannot be separated out from the question of the truth of theism. Since the two questions are so entangled, the atheist cannot say something like “even if God did exist, belief in God would be irrational because there is insufficient evidence.” That’s the point of the argument. It doesn’t establish whether or not belief in God really is properly basic with respect to warrant or whether or not theism is true; it just shows that the atheist cannot disparage the rationality of theism without already assuming that theism is false.

God Bless,
Kenny

bd-from-kg

Kenny:

The link worked fine for me last night and still works this morning. Anyone else having problems with it?

ReasonableDoubt:

The meaning of "warrant" in the theory of knowledge has very little to do with its everyday or "ordinary language" meaning.

Kenny

One shouldn’t, which is why I haven’t departed from my ontological perspective of theism and embraced metaphysical naturalism.

Do you really think this now rainbow? Do you really think that Metaphysical Naturalism is somehow established by science rather than just being another metaphysical dogma in and of itself? If so, I am disappointed, since you are falling into the same mental traps which, prior to your conversion, you were so apt in being able to deconstruct. Perhaps you might be interested in my take on the issue of the relationship between science and Christianity and why I do not see them as incompatible? I hope you will indulge me by reading my essay, but if you lack for the time, then I understand.

Well, from my perspective, theism provides the solid foundation and metaphysical naturalism the goo, but I suppose just making such assertions will not be of any avail for either of us.

I still pray for you rainbow; I hope you will find your way back home someday.

God Bless,
Kenny