Blog Posts

Natural Born Believers?

11/21/2011

J.L. Schellenberg thinks that God should have equipped our faculties of reason such that we naturally form belief in God from the first moment that we are capable of entering into a relationship with God. He readily admits that what he is talking about here is non-propositional evidence; something like Plantinga’s properly basic belief. Well, there is mounting empirical evidence that children are natural born believers. If this is true, then it seems to me that Schellenberg’s argument would be defeated, although a more nuanced reply would be required to spell out more carefully why this is so, but in short, God is not hidden if we are all natural born believers. In fact, it appears that God has done this:

Justin Barrett: Why Would Anyone Believe in God? / Natural Born Believers

http://media.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/WebMedia/FAR245%20Barrett.mov

Michael Brooks “Natural Born Believers” /Pascal Boyer & Deborah Kelemen “Are Children Intuitive Theists”/Paul Bloom

jaar-clark-barrett-reid_3.pdf
File Size:	250 kb
File Type:	pdf

Download File

0 Comments

Providential ordering of people's internal epistemic attitudes, contexts, inferences, and available information?

9/12/2011

0 Comments

Granting that cognitive psychology has identified that people can miss overwhelming evidence for the truth of some proposition, it still may seem reasonable to hold that there is such a thing as reasonable error where a person tries there best to gather the right evidence, and evaluate it as honestly as possible, but can't be epistemically faulted for missing the evidence for God since they have different background beliefs, information, priors, inferential heuristics and the like. What about such people? While it is true that people can be rational, and even justified, yet wrong in their beliefs, it seem that they could still be culpable for winding up for where they are with respect to things like there background beliefs, priors, etc since confirmation bias has been in effect from the beginning and has led them down a developmental cognitive path. But, even if I am wrong about this, I think that God can, and plausibly would providentially design the cognitive development of any indivudal who would be persuaded by the evidence for His existence, that that person will have freely developed down the right cognitive path in order to evaluate the arguments of natural theology with the right background information, priors, inferential heuristics etc. That means that nobody who doesn't believe in God because they find the evidence insufficient, and who is "reasonable" in their doubt (though I very much doubt this is an empirically consistent view of how human beings really are), would have believed in God had they formed the proper background beliefs, priors, etc. This means that God is not obligated to lead a person down such a path of cognitive development if HE knew that it wouldn't do any good.

0 Comments

Bayes, Divine Hiddenness, Natural Theology, and the Power of a Cumulative Case

6/6/2011

0 Comments

Anonymous said... Thanks Lydia,

If you would, I have another question related to Bayes that would be very helpful for me and others that I speak with to get a handle on.

Just as the cumulative force of the likelihood ratios for multiple, independent eyewitness testimony can be mathematically modeled to show the Bayes Factor, or the direction the evidence is pointing, I was hoping to model the cumulative case for Christian theism from the arguments of Natural Theology in a similar manner.

0 Comments

Maximum Uncertainty of Three Arguments for God

6/2/2011

0 Comments

Wow, thanks Tim!

Assuming the same values from your post (2 premises each as likely as .7), except this time we add Argument C with the same number of premises and the same probability for each premise, would this be the correct mathematical representation:

~A1 & A2 & ~B1 & B2 & ~C1 & C2
~A1 & A2 & ~B1 & B2 & C1 & ~C2
~A1 & A2 & B1 & ~B2 & ~C1 & C2
~A1 & A2 & B1 &~ B2 & C1 & ~C2

0 Comments

Better Evidence and Heaps of Sand

5/27/2011

1 Comment

    Sorites Paradoxes involve vague predicates of discrete quantities that upon analysis turn out to lead to absurdities, or arbitrary cut off points. For example, consider the phrase "heap of sand." How many discrete granules of sand would it take to constitute a heap of sand? Let's say you choose 100,000 granules as sufficient to constitute a heap of sand. Would you say that 99,999 granules is also a heap of sand? If you answer no, then you would have to give some justification for your answer that wasn't arbitrary, which can't be done. If you answer yes, then we can repeat this process until we are down to a single granule, and at no point could we non-abritarirly say, okay, after subtracting that last granule we transitioned from a heap of sand to a non-heap of sand.
      There are a few ways to escape the paradox. One, is to deny that heaps of sand exist, which seems absurd. Consider a parallel paradox, but instead of sand, think of baldness. We could ask how many hairs you can lose before you are bald, and we run into the same kind of paradox. But nobody wants to say that there are no clear cases of being bald. The other way to try and escape the paradox is to name some lower and upper limit cases that are clear examples of the predicate under consideration (baldness, heap of sand, being rich, etc.) even though we could accuse such limit cases as being wholly arbitrary.
    Sorites paradoxes are also relevant to Divine Hiddenness arguments because the proponents of such arguments say that if God existed He would have given us a "heap of evidence" so that everyone would believe in Him. However, we do not have a "heap of evidence." Therefore, God doesn't exist.  Since, there are clear cases of sufficient evidence, we don't want to take the first way out of this paradox and say that there is no such thing as enough evidence to consititue a "heap." The second alternative seems better, but then I would want to know what non-abitrary criteria we can use to determine whether or not the evidence we have falls into the classification of a "heap." Whatever discrete and quantitative criteria an atheist comes up with for establihsing a lower and upper bound (where everything within those bounds consitutes a heap of evidence) would undoubtedly have to let in the amount of evidence we do have.  Therefore, the Divine Hiddenness argument is asking for something we already have, but it tries to obfuscate this evidence by relying on vague predicates.

1 Comment

Non-Inferential, Non-evidential, Properly Basic Warrant for belief in God

5/27/2011

0 Comments

As the Divine Hiddenness argument stands, it is not necessarily asking for evidence of God's existence that is public. This is wise because it may not be necessary, or even the best way for God to provide human beings with warranted knowledge of His existence, all things being equal. Here is a religous epistemology developed by William Lane Craig that speaks to why God would make belief in Him warranted primarily in a properly basic manner, and secondarily in an evidential manner:

http://www.rfmedia.org/av/video/christian-apologetics-who-needs-it-ccac07/

0 Comments

Absence of Evidence Evidence of Absence.

5/27/2011

2 Comments

As I understand the argument, the real crux of the matter is that the absence of evidence for God is evidence of God’s absence. Michael Scriven has said that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence when two conditions are met:

1) We have looked in all the right places for evidence of the thing under scrutiny.
2) Assuming the existence of the thing under investigation, we should expect to see more evidence of that thing then we in fact do.

For example, we have looked in the right places for Santa Claus, and assuming Santa Claus exists, we don’t have as much evidence as we would expect if Santa Claus really did exist. Therefore, in the case of Santa Claus, absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Apply this now to the case of God. Have we looked in all the right places? Maybe, but it has only been fairly recently that we have found the kinds of evidence being used today in arguments for the existence of God. Let that pass, assume we have looked in all the right places, I do not think condition two above can be met by the atheist. Assuming god exists, should we expect to have more evidence of His existence than a contingent universe, the origin of the universe out of nothing a finite time ago, the fine-tuning of the constants in the laws of physics, the apprehension of a realm of objective moral values and duties, the radical claims and historical evidence pertaining to the resurrection of Jesus, and the inner witness of the Holy Spirit?! Clearly not. Notice that this point stands even if as you say, these arguments only convince a small number of people, or that they are convoluted because that still means there isn’t enough absence of evidence to constitute evidence of God’s absence. So, we would be left with agnosticism, which as you know (thanks to Plantinga) is compatible with Christianity being true. Before we look at an objection that naturally arises considering my response so far, let me say that I think you are right to point out that these arguments are difficult and the like. So, since not everyone has had access to them, the ability to understand them, and the like, God (the Christian one) has given people an inner witness (or properly basic belief) that has been accessible to all people, at all times, and in all circumstances that is sufficient for producing saving knowledge. God has made it easy so to speak to believe in Him in a non-evidential, and non-propositional manner which you I think would say is necessary, but of course, the Divine Hiddenness argument is asking God for evidential reasons to believe in Him, but maybe that might not be necessary for producing knowledge of God if such a belief is properly basic. However, I am taking the Divine Hiddenness argument on its own terms. So, I don’t think the Divine Hiddenness argument is a good one given what I have said thus far. However, like the bump in the rug, I think the atheist should ask okay well couldn’t God have given us “better” or “clearer” evidence of His existence, rather than all this fine-tuning stuff?

2 Comments

Couldn't God Have Given us "Clearer" Evidence?

5/27/2011

0 Comments

The term clearer here is ambiguous and requires some exploration:
1) Clearer-immediate, present, in the now, directly experienced by the senses
2) Clearer-Well explained, easy to grasp, understandable
3) Clearer-Evidence that increases the likelihood that the entity under consideration exists

Let's take these sense of the term clearer in order:
1) Good evidence is not a function of its temporal location. For example, astronomy is a science of the past. Our knowledge of the evolution of galaxies is "clear" and yet based on events that are billions of years old. This means that evidence for some proposition or entity can be strong even if that evidence comes to us as a vestige from the past.

2) The premises in the arguments for the existence of God are easily grasped by persons of average intelligence. They rest on claims such as there is an external world, we know that the universe began to exist because the universe is currently expanding, it is highly unlikely that our universe should permit life because most universe are hostile to life, rape is wrong, etc. None of these is difficult to understand. These premises only become convoluted when professional skeptics with Phd's convolute them. So while not everybody can defend these arguments against the best minds in the world, it doesn't take the best mind in the world to understand them, and be convinced by them.

3) According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
The most widely accepted probabilistic account of evidence is the so-called increase-in-probability or positive- relevance account. The idea is simply that E is evidence for H if and only if E makes H more probable. In symbols, E is evidence for H if and only if

P(H/E) > P(H)

where this is to be interpreted as saying that the probability of H given E is greater than the probability of H alone. Along similar lines, we can say that E is evidence against H if and only if

P(H/E) < P(H).

Finally, we may say that E is neither evidence for, nor against, H iff

P(H/E) = P(H).

THE GOD HYPOTHESIS:
Considering the Big 5 attributes of God (Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnibenevolence, Personhood, and Singularity), I can't conceive of a better positive-relevance account of evidence that would serve to raise the probability of the God Hypothesis than the evidence we in fact do have. Assuming that my readers have a strong background in the arguments for the existence of God, I will simply list each argument and the evidence in favor of the argument with the evidentially relevant attribute of God that is probabilistically relevant to each argument:

1) Kalam Argument: Singular, Personhood, incredibly powerful (Evidence: Origin of all space-time and its contents ex nihilo)

2) Fine-Tuning Argument: Personal, Singular, and incredibly intelligent mind (Fine-tuning of the constants and quantities in the laws of physics as well as certain abitrary values on which the laws of nature act)

3) Moral Argument: Necessary, personal, singular, perfectly good being. (Apprehension of a realm of objective non-natural moral facts)

4) Historical Case for the Resurrection: Christian theism (empty tomb, post-mortem appearances, origin of the disciples belief).

Using the method of inference to the best explanation we can rule out any other candidate Gods that would explain the first three arguments just as well as Christian theism because Christian theism has the most explanatory scope and power of any candidate Gods when we consider the Resurrection.

Thus, my challenege to the atheist is to come up with any evidence God could have given us, that would have more of an evidentially positive-relevance to the Big 5 attributes of God as compared to the evidence we in fact do have. Things like sky-writing, booming voices, and the like, aren't as evidentially linked to God's attributes as compared to the evidence we do have, especially in the case of moral perfection.

0 Comments

Human Beings Aren't Perfectly Rational Truth Seekers

5/26/2011

0 Comments

One of the implicit assumptions of the Divine Hiddenness argument against the existence of God is:

If there were sufficient, or overwhelming evidence for the existence of some object, or the truth of some proposition, then intelligent people looking for that evidence wouldn't culpably miss it somehow; either because of the influence of non-cognitive , and/or cognitive processes, or some other factor(s).

However, recent empirical studies coming out of neuropsychology have disconfirmed this assumption. Here is a link to a number of great articles that disconfirm this premise along with the conclusion of each study:

0 Comments

Forward>>

Categories