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

9/12/2011

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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.
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