Philosophy, Theology, History, Science, Big Questions
  • Homepage
    • Collections of Works By Great Thinkers
    • How To Become A Christian
    • Apologetics: Who Need's It
    • Ask ?'s
    • Introduce a New Topic to Discuss
    • Other Recommended Websites / Reading
    • 12 Pitfalls of the Foolish Apologist
    • Apologetics 101: The Basics
  • Phil. Theology
  • Phil. of Religion
    • Arguments for the Existence of God
    • Objections to the Arguments for the Existence of God
    • Defeaters of Divine Hiddenness
    • Defeaters of the Problem of Evil and Divine Silence
    • More Arguments Against Christian Theism
    • The Problem of Miracles
    • Incompatible Properties Argument
    • Reformed Epistemology
    • Molinism
    • Primary Sources On Big Topics In Phil. Of Religion
  • Phil. of Science/Time
    • The Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics
    • Fine-Tuning is a Fact
    • Absolute Beginnings
    • God/Time/Cosmology
    • Scientific Realism
  • Biblical Studies
    • Substantial New Testament Puzzles (In Progress)
    • Substantial Old Testament Puzzles (In Progress)
    • Evolution and Christianity
    • Rethinking Biblical Inspiration (In Progress)
    • The Gospels: Guilty Until Proven Innocent?
    • The Historical Case for the Resurrection >
      • Objections to the Resurrection
  • Scholarly Naturalism
    • Paul Draper
    • J.L. Schellenberg
    • Gregory Dawes

A Logical Implication Of The Divine Hiddenness Argument

10/23/2012

0 Comments

 
It seems that what a proponent of the divine hiddenness argument is committed to is something like the following:
There are persons in the world who do not believe given the actual evidence in the world, but who WOULD have believed had they been given different evidence then they in fact do have.

But how do we know this is true?  I think there are two ways to argue for this: 1) Point out that it is incredibly unlikely that all the people (for example) who have been born in a time and place where they never got to hear the Gospel (for example) are by chance, just those people who would not have believed in it
AND

2) People can reliably predict what would not only cause them to believe in God, but also have that belief PERSIST.
The first argument is correct if we assume that an OMNI-God exists but cannot be providential in the world by making it the case that anyone who would believe recieves suffcient revelation, but clearly an OMNI-God could do such a thing so this argument works simply in virtue of not thinking big enough with the idea of God at hand and thus is a failure.  The second argument sounds so commensensical.  I mean, people will tell that I would believe in God if He did x, y, and z.  However, I think modern cog. psychology has shown us that his incredibly commonsensical idea, namely, that people can predict what would change their minds is patently false.  For example, what would you predict would make you happier; winning the lottery, or being paralyzed in an accident?  Obviously, wining the lottery right?  Shouldn't lottery winners be ecstatic and paralyzed accident victims be miserable? Wrong:
/  Examples like this can be multiplied as well.  So, I really can't see that this crucial assumption of the divine hiddenness argument is probably true given the undercutting defeaters above. 
0 Comments

Matt McCormick (An Atheist) On The Divine Hiddenness (Well Sort Of)

9/8/2012

0 Comments

 
Schellenberg has much to say about the nature of God and very little to say about human nature.  Indeed, his picture of human nature presumed in his argument as far as I can tell is a very commonsensical one, but still a false one in light of cog. psy.  When a correct picture of human nature is produced, we see that just because 'apparent' non-resistant belief is reported and observed, it turns out that that appearance is far from the reality.  This ends up providing an undercutting defeater to divine hiddenness that doesn't require anyone to say that atheists are really theists, or anything silly like that.  It is important to emphasize that this data from cog. sci. isn't a theistic or atheistic issue, it is an issue of human nature and thus confronts all human beings everywhere at every time so Schellenberg's different kinds of 'apparent' non-resistant belief won't do him any good here.  The following is taken from Matt McCormick's blogsite (www. provingthenegative) and is not used in the manner that I intend here since Matt is not talking about divine hiddenness directly though I find the connection obvious.
knowing_your_own_mind_about_god.docx
File Size: 20 kb
File Type: docx
Download File

0 Comments

Petitionary Prayer and Divine Hiddenness

8/16/2012

0 Comments

 
Some people argue that a seeming lack of answered prayer is surprising on Christian theism since God is alleged to answer prayers and moreover, answered prayer would go a long way towards  perhaps to providing an evidential basis for theism and thus rebutting the divine hiddenness argument as well.  However, the following excerpt from the SEP on petitionary prayer, IMO, provides very strong reason to think that answered prayer would not be a good place to look to provide evidence for the truth of Christian theism.

(
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/petitionary-prayer/#Epi)...Epistemology

Would it ever be possible to know or reasonably believe that God has answered a particular petitionary prayer? Different authors disagree about this question. Some theists think that for all we know, for any particular event that happens, God may have had independent reasons for bringing it about, so we cannot know whether or not God has brought it about because of a prayer (as opposed to bringing it about for some other reason—for more on this argument, see Basinger 2004 and Davison 2009). This line of thought is especially interesting in light of the recent popularity of so-called skeptical theism, which responds to the problem of evil by claiming that we can never know exactly how particular events are connected with each other and with good or bad consequences, some of which may be beyond our understanding (see McBrayer 2010, Other Internet Resources). Others argue that as long as people are justified in believing, in general terms, that God sometimes answers prayers, then it is possible to believe reasonably that one's petitionary prayer has been answered when one knows that the thing requested has come to pass (see Murray and Meyers 1994, Murray 2004).

A number of people have tried to conduct statistical studies to determine whether or not petitionary prayer is effective. These studies try to measure the differences between groups of people, one of which is the subject of petitionary prayers, and the other of which is not. But these studies seem to be flawed from the outset (see Brümmer 2008). First of all, there is no way to control the groups so that any group of people is the subject of no petitionary prayers, since it is impossible to prevent people from praying for any particular person. Second, God is assumed to be a free person, not a natural force that acts automatically in all similar cases, so we cannot assume that God will simply ignore those people for whom petitionary prayers have not been offered. This means that even if a study showed some statistically significant difference between the two groups of people, we could not be sure that it was due to petitionary prayers. In general, then, there seems to be no straightforward, completely empirical way to confirm (or disconfirm) the effectiveness of petitionary prayer. Of course, if God were to reveal directly to someone that something was a direct answer to prayer, then this could provide knowledge of that fact, but theists rarely claim to possess such revelation.

0 Comments

Noseeum's and Plausible Morally Sufficient Reasons For Some Degree of Divine Hiddenness

7/19/2012

0 Comments

 
murray_taylor_hiddenness.pdf
File Size: 206 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

0 Comments

2 Human Responses That May Necessitate a Degree of Hiddenness

2/28/2012

0 Comments

 
2_human_responses.docx
File Size: 11 kb
File Type: docx
Download File

0 Comments

Four types of Non-Resistant Belief

12/21/2011

0 Comments

 
Some nonresistant nonbelievers are former believers; some lifelong seekers. Others are converts to nontheistic religion; and still others isolated nontheists. And drawing on considerations about responsiveness and caring,
noncapriciousness and justice, faithfulness, generosity, truthfulness, nondeceptiveness, and providence, so this argument claims, we can show the difficulty of squaring the existence of God with each of these types of nonresistant nonbelief. For why, if a God of perfect moral character exists, should we have onetime believers trying to make their way home without being able to do so; or dedicated seekers failing to find, or taking themselves to have found a truth that only enmeshes them in a meaning system distortive of what must, if God exists, be the truth; or individuals being entirely formed by a fundamentally misleading meaning system? Some of the arguments involved here are deductive, and some proceed inductively – for example, by analogy with the behaviour of human parents.

RESPONSE:


Read More
0 Comments

Theodore Drange's Version of the Divine Hiddenness Argument

12/21/2011

0 Comments

 
He considers the distinction between culpable and inculpable nonbelief to be completely irrelevant, and tries to argue that the mere existence of nonbelief is evidence against the existence of God. A semi-formal presentation of the argument is as follows:[16]
  1. If God exists, God:
    1. wants all humans to believe God exists before they die;
    2. can bring about a situation in which all humans believe God exists before they die;
    3. does not want anything that would conflict with and be at least as important as its desire for all humans to believe God exists before they die; and
    4. always acts in accordance with what it most wants.
  2. If God exists, all humans would believe so before they die (from 1).
  3. But not all humans believe God exists before they die.
  4. Therefore, God does not exist (from 2 and 3).

Read More
0 Comments

Stephen Maitzen's Version of the 'Divine Hiddenness' Argument.

12/21/2011

1 Comment

 
1)  The following document is a summary of Jason Marsh's Response to Maitzen:
divine_hiddenness.docx
File Size: 15 kb
File Type: docx
Download File

1 Comment

Divine Hiddenness and the Nature of Belief

12/6/2011

0 Comments

 
An article by Ted Poston and Trent Dougherty where they argue that an in depth analysis on the nature of belief reveals a fatal flaw in Schellenberg's argument.  Here is a link to this fantastic article:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnx0cmVudGRvdWdoZXJ0eXxneDo0NDZmMzlmNmZlMGU1YTc3
0 Comments

Schellenberg's Three Supporting Arguments for Thinking that non-resistant non-belief occurs:

11/23/2011

0 Comments

 
1) Many people claim that if there were better evidence, they would sincerely believe in God.
2) Some people have done a seemingly exemplary job of weighing the arguments for and against the existence of God, and wound up agnostic (i.e. Paul Draper).
3) When an issue is controversial in the sense that there exists epistemic peer disagreement, the proper rational response is to become agnostic.

RESPONSE:

1) The first and second claim presupposes that people have infallible, or even reliable access to the reasons that they believe things through introspection.  However, recent work in cognitive psychology is revealing that despite what it feels like (i.e. sincerity), we don't have reliable introspective access as to the reasons we believe lots of things, including higher-order beliefs (See Timothy Wilson's: Strangers to Ourselves).

2) While introspection is again relevant here, this second claim also presupposes that if there were sufficient evidence for the existence of God, that human beings wouldn't culpably miss it somehow.  However, recent work in cognitive psychology has revealed that exactly the opposite is true.  Not only can a person culpably miss the direction of the evidence, but such a person can and will even construct arguments against the existence of that thing even if they claim to be agnostic (i.e. Paul Draper).  Human beings engage if motivated skepticism, motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, research bias, and much much more.

3)  The third claim presupposes a view in the epistemology of disagreement called the Equal Weight View which I think is false.  The Equal Weight View is self-referentially incoherent.  For there are those who disagree with the Equal Weight View in which case a proponent of the Equal Weight couldn't rationally hold there view anymore since .5x.5=.25  Moreover, the Equal Weight view presupposes that the mere belief held by an epistemic peer can constitute higher-order evidence in addition to evidence qua evidence.  But, this confuses psychological confidence with evidential justification.  Surely, when we meet others who hold our beliefs that can boost our psychological confidence, but it does nothing to make an argument stronger in and of itself.

Thus, the argument from divine hiddenness not only presupposes that agnosticism is true, (that the evidence is exactly balanced), but it tries to defend its central premise with three shoddy points.  Thus, this argument would only work if one could show on independent grounds that god's existence is unlikely or .5 likely.  But then, the divine hiddenness argument is a dependent argument, and no longer an independent argument.  Thus, all by itself, it shouldn't concern us. 

0 Comments
<<Previous

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed