- This post is The Faith Heuristic's opening statement.
- AIG Busted: Opening statement
- AIG Busted: A rebuttal
- The Faith Heuristic: A rebuttal to AIG Busted's opening.
This was where the debate formally ended, but on mutual agreement we both decided to continue with AIG Busted's rebuttal to my opening post.
- The Faith Heuristic: I draw out the main themes that have emerged.
- AIG Busted! responds by focusing in on the evil demon.
- The Faith Heuristic response.
- AIG Busted!
- The Faith Heuristic:. Comparing the evil demon case to the egg sandwich case.
- AIG Busted! Closing post.
First I want to offer my thanks to AIG Busted! for agreeing to this debate. I welcome his posts and am sure I will learn something from his arguments. Secondly I want to clarify my position. I am defending the point that faith in God is rational without evidence other than one’s own personal religious experiences. I am not arguing that all beliefs are rational without evidence. Scientific beliefs need evidence. Beliefs about the proper way to fly an airplane need evidence. If you disagree then I hope you are never piloting a plane that I’m on!
Even atheists hold beliefs without evidence. Do you remember the movie The Matrix? In it a computer hacker finds out that his whole life was a lie. It was really a virtual reality illusion created by artificially intelligent machines who had conquered humanity. All the humans had been captured and raised in coffin-like pods. Electrodes hooked into their spinal cord took over their senses and created the illusion that they lived normal 20th century lives. If you saw the movie you probably whether you were trapped in a matrix, too. Suppose that you too are the prisoner of evil machines?
The movie is actually an homage to one of the most famous problems in philosophy. It was created by the 17th century philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes. In his version the issue was whether or not our lives were the illusions of an evil demon. That led to his famous “I think, therefore I am” proof. The problem was that his argument failed because it used circular reasoning.
Other philosophers picked up the gauntlet and Descartes’ evil demon became the inspiration for modern philosophy. Hundreds of years later no one has succeeded in proving that what we perceive as reality is actually real (a few maverick philosophers claim to have created a proof, but they have not been accepted). Think about it. You can’t use science because any scientific experiment would be part of the evil demon’s illusion. No matter how you slice it, the belief that the world is an illusion is observationally identical to the belief that the world is real. There is no scientific test you can do to tease the two apart – to confirm one and refute the other. We are trapped. Even the most hard-headed atheist has to take it on faith that there is no evil demon. Or does he? You can’t falsify the existence of the evil demon, but you could apply Ockham’s razor. Atheists might claim that the existence of an evil demon is an inelegant kludge. But then, it could also be pointed out that a world of just you and the evil demon is a lot simpler than the vast universe we believe exists (we will revisit this topic again when we look at defeaters below).
There are other beliefs that are similar. How do you know that other people see the color red the same way that you see the color red? If you have Adobe Illustrator or similar software you could take your pictures and add various effects and change the way the colors look. How do you know that other people don’t see that way? How do you know that objects like trees and chairs continue to exist even when you aren’t looking at them? How do you know that you had a bowl of Cheerios for breakfast yesterday? How do you know that the universe didn’t just spring into existence five minutes ago, with photons in mid-transit from distant stars that it never left, and with you having memories of a past that never existed? The point is that people have a lot of beliefs without evidence and these beliefs are all rational.
Properly Basic Beliefs
Alvin Plantinga calls them properly basic beliefs. They are like the foundation of a house. Other beliefs can rest on properly basic beliefs but they themselves do not rest on anything. Belief in God is also a properly basic belief. Now, the fact that these beliefs are properly basic and do not require evidence does not mean that they are immune from rational challenge. Critics can provide defeaters. The argument from ockham's razor is a defeater against the belief that the world is the illusion of an evil demon. Atheists can also provide defeaters against belief in God. An atheist may make the case that a loving God would not allow evil. Or that God would not be so distant as to make believers rely on a religious experience – instead he would be more “face to face” with His flock the way He was with Adam and Eve. There are a million possible defeaters for belief in God and all you have to do is pick up a book on atheism and you will be exposed to many of them.
But there are two key points. Here is the first. The fact that faith in God is properly basic means that the burden of proof falls on atheists to provide a defeater. It does not fall on Christians to provide evidence. The second key point is that there are also “defeater defeaters.” Christians have philosophical arguments in response to the problem of evil and other defeaters. But the ultimate defeater defeater is the internal witness of the Holy Spirit. Suppose an atheist makes a powerful argument against the existence of God. The believer feels tremendous doubt - but also feels the Holy Spirit in his heart. The personal experience of God can outweigh the doubt placed by an argument. I’ve been arguing that faith is rational without evidence but now I’m going a step further. Faith is rational even when all the evidence is against you.
Here is an analogy. Suppose you were cleverly framed for murder and all the evidence shows that you did it. Fingerprints, DNA, you name it. But you know perfectly well that you were at home watching Twilight. You should not have to set aside your personal experience for the publicly available evidence and conclude that you must be guilty after all (being diagnosed with a psychological disorder would be a defeater for that belief). Of course, neutral third parties should conclude that you did it since they don’t have the benefit of your personal experience.
Now it is time to forestall two rebuttals. The first objection is that people of many different faiths have religious experiences, but clearly at most one religion is true (Unitarians would disagree, but I'm not a Unitarian). Thus most religious experiences are false. But let’s take a look at those experiences. In most pagan/animist religions those experiences happen under the influence of drugs such as peyote. Now, that may not be a successful defeater of paganism/animism (because the pagan's religious experience was so powerful) but it is a successful defeater defeater of the atheist's objection from many religions. While we're on the subject I can think of many other explanations for false religious beliefs. Some people are charlatans and want money and power. Other people have psychological problems. Some people may feel pressure to conform to the norms of the society and end out deluding themselves. Also, if the Christian God exists then demons also exist. They might enjoy ruining peoples’ lives but they would enjoy even more creating new religions. Heck, if I were an evil demon that’s what I would do.
The second objection is that atheists will happily agree about how unreliable religious experiences are. They will then argue that Christians are mistaking a delusion for a personal religious experience. That objection is guilty of the logical fallacy of begging the question - assuming what one purports to prove. Suppose for the sake of argument that God really does exist. In that case personal religious experiences are a rational basis for faith. Conversely, let’s suppose for the sake of argument that God does not exist. Then personal religious experiences must be a delusion. Either way, the validity of personal religious experiences turns on whether or not God exists. Until atheists provide that successful defeater then Christians are entitled to rely on their personal religious experiences.
10 comments:
I see.
So if you feel you are right about something, you don't need evidence for it.
'Suppose for the sake of argument that God really does exist. In that case personal religious experiences are a rational basis for faith.'
So all you have to do now is provide evidence that God exists, and you have nailed this debate.
'Religious experiences'?
Do you hear voices? Do you have dreams?
Describe these religious experiences.
Hi Steven,
Thanks for your comment. I made it very clear at the start of my post that only some beliefs do not need evidence. I then identified a category of beliefs that even atheists hold without evidence. If we switch to Bayesian decision theory then the issue turns to: are you allowed to use personal experience when deciding the strength of a subjective prior. The answer is, of course, yes. Unless you are agnostic about what you had for breakfast!
Given that these beliefs are rational without evidence (other than personal experience), then arguments about whether they come from delusion are guilty of the logical fallacy of begging the question.
As to my own personal experiences, here is the quick and dirty version. I was an atheist for the first 32 years of my life. But then one sunday afternoon I had a feeling of tremendous peace and love. I was just hanging out alone in my apartment. I remember thinking "either I'm on drugs or there is a God." I hadn't taken any drugs (I was never cool enough to be much of a druggie, although I experimented). I got on line to look for Christian message boards and then changed my mind. But over the next year or two it became clear that this experience was the work of the Holy Spirit.
I won't do the oversharing, but about a month later a sexual depravity that I'd had as long as I could remember (at least age 7) went away. I also met a woman and fell in love and she was an evangelical Christian. My best friend had actually converted to Catholicism although he was a liberal Catholic who hated George Bush (he's conservative now). At a more personal level my atheist parents and old friends have also noticed that I've since softend and have fewer rough edges (although they are not gone). Overall it has since become overwhelmingly obvious that my life was being steered towards God beginning with that experience.
Have you ever had a religious experience? What were the circumstances under which it happened? Did you believe it, even if only for a while?
Justin,
I am so glad to be reading about your personal encounter with God (and hopefully his Son, Jesus Christ)! Too often it is the other way around that we read on the internet - some weak-minded soul decides he is going to go all out and become "a"theistic simply because some self-inflated anti-theist posted a thought which momentarily sounded intelligent. I hope and pray for your continued growth in Him. Hang on to that experience! Sometimes it feels like that is all we've got in this depraved society in which we dwell. I will breeze by here occasionally to see what the latest happenings are around 'Faith Heuristic.' God bless.
Here are some direct comments to Steven Carr who posted above. His thoughts are in "". Mine follow his.
"I see. So if you feel you are right about something, you don't need evidence for it."
Those are your words – purely contrived at your fancy. Namely, because they do not appear anywhere in the context of the argument at hand. They certainly are not a beginning premise of Justin M.
"'Suppose for the sake of argument that God really does exist. In that case personal religious experiences are a rational basis for faith.' So all you have to do now is provide evidence that God exists, and you have nailed this debate."
But wait…you are the one who predicated the argument on these words: “Suppose for the sake of argument that God really does exist.” I think before you can challenge Justin to provide evidence of this, you need to setup an entirely different argument that sounds like this: “Suppose for the sake of argument that God really does not exist.” The only problem is that now your ambivalence in the matter is exposed. Namely, you can’t prove either case to be true! You can really only argue that one is more agreeable to you than the other. So, Justin M. is correct in asserting that experience alone is a justifiable cause for belief in a person, system, or even God.
”Do you hear voices? Do you have dreams?”
We have heard the same voices as you: first, our mother, then father, then a host of family and friends. Then one day we heard, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” You heard that same voice. We obeyed. What did you do?
Hey Justin,
First off, I might have just missed it, but is there a link so that I can see the actual debate that occurred between you and
AIG Busted?
Secondly, how do you know what beliefs are properly basic beliefs and which aren't? You say that, "Belief in God is also a properly basic belief". How do you know this? What makes you think that the existence of God is a properly basic belief? What criteria do you use to determine whether or not a belief is "properly basic"?
Hiya Alec,
The top of this post has links to every post in the debate.
Alvin Plantinga has a fairly rigorous list of requirements but I'm more relaxed. I would argue that all beliefs formed on the basis of personal experience under situations of healthy cognitive functioning are properly basic. That does not mean that they are true. Nor does it mean that they can't be refuted.
My belief that I see a barn by the side of the road is rational on the basis of my own experience. That would be true even if it were wrong - perhaps it was a giant billboard designed to look like a barn. But until someone points this out to me this belief is rational.
Similarly, my belief in God is rational on the basis of my own experience. It may be the case that this belief is false and there is no God - but until someone makes an argument against the existence of God - perhaps the problem of evil - this belief is rational.
Following on this line of thought, would that mean that my disbelief in ghosts, in spite of having seen what a believer would consider a ghost, is irrational?
Is it still rational to hold on to that view if I can artificially create the same feeling of 'oneness/holy spirit' by stimulating a part of your brain with an electrode?
I understand where you are coming from, but the belief in God from personal revelation cannot be considered as rational a belief to hold as the belief that you had eggs for breakfast. It is like arguing that it is an equally valid belief that you had eggs for breakfast as believing you had unicorn eggs for breakfast. One is manifestly less likely and so requiring a great deal more proof than the other.
As for your Matrix-like universe, I entirely agree. So much so that I use it as a more likely explanation for any strange thing that someone attributes to God. I actually prefer the Virtual Reality-esque universe that exists inside a computer in the 13th Floor rather than the Matrix universe.
Commenting hella-long after the debate... since I found your blog there is much catching up to do.
I'll try and keep this short:
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Don't you pretty much refute your final paragraph with your second-to-last one? You seem to be begging the question yourself, Justin!
In other words, you propose that other religions have experiences and by assuming that only one is true (yours) from the start, you give us a long list of possible explanations.
Yet you accuse atheists of the same thing in the last paragraph??
It would seem that the coherent thing to do would be to at least suspect a third (and I believe more true) occurrence: people in other religions have experiences just like yours that are in no way differentiable and in no way possess glaring possible causes.
Why did you skip over the simpler hypothesis (these phenomenon are not unique to religious but universally human) and posit all kinds of deficiencies, weaknesses, or illnesses instead?
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Also, the 'burden of proof' is only on atheists because that's the rule you set up. You have quarantined god as properly basic and therefore requiring of overturning rather than requiring any evidence whatsoever to get there from other [what I suspect are] far more justified basic beliefs.
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Lastly, doesn't your epistemology leave the door wide open for 'inspired' abortion clinic bombers? Any argument against them may be easily refuted by the 'ultimate defeater defeater' -- the Holy Spirit!
I believe that in the begining there existed only two creatures. these creatures have existed forver and are the creators and rulers of all.
They did not mean to create anything at all, it just happened. one is a green-winged fairy (not at all the same as one with blue wings, mind you), and the other a unicorn. they were playing around in the nothingness that was, and then the unicorn accidentally slipped his horn into the fairy's rectum, which ruptured, and out spilled everything we know today.
This, as you can clearly see, is as good a "properly basic belief" as any other, including your own.
Of course, that doesn't stop it from being batshit crazy.
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