http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/paul_draper/evil.html
Draper argues for two things: 1) Naturalism has smaller scope and greater simplicity than theism making it a prior more probable, and 2) Naturalism has greater predictive power than theism with respect to observation
E: "For a variety of biological and ecological reasons, organisms compete for survival, with some having an advantage in the struggle for survival over others; as a result, many organisms, including many sentient beings, never flourish because they die before maturity, many others barely survive, but languish for most or all of their lives, and those that reach maturity and flourish for much of their lives usually languish in old age; in the case of human beings and some nonhuman animals as well, languishing often involves intense or prolonged suffering."
He later adds the following observations related to E that he briefly argues favor naturalism over theism as well in terms of retrospective predictive power: "Human beings know a lot about their immediate environment and about other matters upon which their survival directly depends. Our cognitive faculties are, however, much less reliable when it comes to moral and religious matters. Surely this is much more surprising on theism than on (Darwinian) naturalism. Or consider the moral qualities of human beings. Humans are as a rule very strongly disposed--I'm tempted to say "hard-wired"--to act selfishly. They are instinctively much more concerned about their own interests than about the interests of others. They do possess some altruistic tendencies, but these are typically very limited. This combination of a deeply ingrained selfishness and limited altruism can be given a plausible Darwinian explanation, but is very hard to understand if, for example, God wants human beings, through the exercise of their free wills, to make substantial moral progress in their short time on earth. Theistic evolution could be Darwinian, but it could also proceed in a variety of other non-Darwinian ways. As long as a perfect God is guiding evolutionary change, natural selection is not crucial for the development of biological complexity. Thus, given theism, it would not be surprising at all if natural selection played no significant role in the development of such complexity. This means that, if E is to be expected on Darwinism, then that is a predictive success for naturalism, but not for theism.
Draper argues for two things: 1) Naturalism has smaller scope and greater simplicity than theism making it a prior more probable, and 2) Naturalism has greater predictive power than theism with respect to observation
E: "For a variety of biological and ecological reasons, organisms compete for survival, with some having an advantage in the struggle for survival over others; as a result, many organisms, including many sentient beings, never flourish because they die before maturity, many others barely survive, but languish for most or all of their lives, and those that reach maturity and flourish for much of their lives usually languish in old age; in the case of human beings and some nonhuman animals as well, languishing often involves intense or prolonged suffering."
He later adds the following observations related to E that he briefly argues favor naturalism over theism as well in terms of retrospective predictive power: "Human beings know a lot about their immediate environment and about other matters upon which their survival directly depends. Our cognitive faculties are, however, much less reliable when it comes to moral and religious matters. Surely this is much more surprising on theism than on (Darwinian) naturalism. Or consider the moral qualities of human beings. Humans are as a rule very strongly disposed--I'm tempted to say "hard-wired"--to act selfishly. They are instinctively much more concerned about their own interests than about the interests of others. They do possess some altruistic tendencies, but these are typically very limited. This combination of a deeply ingrained selfishness and limited altruism can be given a plausible Darwinian explanation, but is very hard to understand if, for example, God wants human beings, through the exercise of their free wills, to make substantial moral progress in their short time on earth. Theistic evolution could be Darwinian, but it could also proceed in a variety of other non-Darwinian ways. As long as a perfect God is guiding evolutionary change, natural selection is not crucial for the development of biological complexity. Thus, given theism, it would not be surprising at all if natural selection played no significant role in the development of such complexity. This means that, if E is to be expected on Darwinism, then that is a predictive success for naturalism, but not for theism.
| facts_draper_seems_to_have_gotten_wrong.docx |
RESPONSE:
SCOPE: Draper's discussion of the comparative scope of naturalism compared to theism relies on a theory of probability which is rejected by almost all probability theorists today, in part because the probabilities that it yields are dependent upon arbitrary choices made by the theorist and are therefore not objective. Many other approaches to probabilistic reasoning have been developed which do not share the failings of Draper's approach,and these do not support his key premiss.
SIMPLICITY: Simplicity only helps adjudicate between equally explanatory hypotheses after such theories have been confirmed by experience. As a logical principle, Occam's razor would demand that scientists accept the simplest possible theoretical explanation for existing data. However, science has shown repeatedly that future data often supports more complex theories than existing data. Science tends to prefer the simplest explanation that is consistent with the data available at a given time, but history shows that these simplest explanations often yield to complexities as new data become available. The point about simplicity then is that we must first establish our data, and if there are competing hypotheses that have equal explanatory power, then we should appeal to simplicity. Draper does just the reverse however, and argues that naturalism is a prior simpler than theism. This is a gross misuse of simplicity. In any case, theism is a priori simpler than naturalism because whereas the universe is complex, and composed of several disparate parts, God is one thing, who is nowhere near as complex as the universe because He isn't composed of any parts.
The second misstep occurs when Draper conflates simplicity with unification. On the unification approach, an event is explained by deriving the occurrence of the event using a theory that unifies many diverse phenomena, and thereby showing that the event is part of a very general, perhaps utterly pervasive, pattern of events in the universe. The unifying power of a theory increases in proportion to the following properties of the theory:
1. Generality, the number of actual phenomena that can be derived using the theory,
2. Simplicity, and
3. Cohesion.
This third desideratum has been characterized in a number of ways. The aim of the desideratum is to discriminate against theories that, rather than picking out real patterns of phenomena, pick out mere unpatterned conjunctions of phenomena (or perhaps even worse, all possible phenomena). Kitcher’s version of a cohesion principle is his stringency requirement. Morrison (2000) presents an account of cohesion (for non-explanatory purposes) on which cohesive theories use a single parameter or set of parameters in all their explanations. While it is true that simplicity appears as one of three properties that go towards a theory having unifying power, notice that simplicity is secondary to generality, or explanatory scope. Thus, once again, Draper begs the question because He hasn't shown us that naturalism has equal or greater unification compared to theism (Note: He use of the word scope above is not the same as explanatory scope).
Thus, Draper has made illegitmate use of scope and simplicity and has so far skipped the hard work of trying to offer any actual evidence for naturalism over theism. To his credit, he does attempt that task in the second part of his paper, namely with respect to E where he argues that naturalism has greater predictive power with respect to Darwinian evolution compared to theism. Now, I have already responded to Draper's E and other observations in my other post on my blog under: Defeating Draper's Argument from Evil, but let me offer additional defeaters here as well.
1) Draper’s arguments, though he may not be aware of it, assumes a Newtonian version of divine providence which suffers from “the underachieving problem” where if we saw numerous divine interventions in the world on the part of some divine being, then these numerous interventions would constitute supreme empirical evidence that such a God was not the greatest of all conceivable beings. Consider the following passage from Michael Murray’s article Natural Providence: Reply to Dembski,
“As I cast the exchange between Newton and Leibniz on the issue of providence over nature, Leibniz makes heavy weather over the fact that the Newtonian God appears to be a designer of less than adequate competence. What sort of God would actualize a creation which would require periodic intervention to keep things from collapsing into disorder and chaos? Leibniz’s answer: only one with less than perfect knowledge, power, or goodness.
There is something very attractive about this position. When I bought my first car, the manufacturer recommended a tune up every twenty thousand miles or so. Cars rolling off the assembly line today hardly need anything like a tune up. With many of these cars, the sort of routine service that would be required every twenty thousand miles need only be done every fifty or one hundred thousand miles. Better engineers with greater understanding and better raw materials are now producing better cars. And I think we suppose that were General Motors to take on a few omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good engineers, cars would be utterly maintenance free (less than wholly good engineers might be able to design such cars, but undoubtedly their greed would get the better of them). The same intuition underlies the Leibnizian picture. If God knows how to bring about all of the states of affairs he wishes to bring about in the course of natural history by deck-staking, what would motivate the creation of a universe that was in need of periodic tune ups?
Christian have argued, that there is something unworthy of a theism which countenances a God who once creates the natural order and yet leaves it without the resources to bring about the desired results. The most vocal advocate of this line in the contemporary arena is
Howard Van Till who argues:
I believe that the universe in its present form is to be seen as a potentiality of the creation that has been actualized by the exercise of its God-given creaturely capabilities. For this to be possible, however, the creation’s formational economy must be astoundingly robust and gapless—lacking none of the resources or capabilities necessary to make possible the sort of continuous actualization of new structures and life forms as now envisioned by the natural sciences. The optimally-equipped character of the universe’s formational economy is, I believe, a vivid manifestation of the fact that it is the product, not of mere accident or happenstance, as the worldview of naturalism would have it, but of intention. In other words, the universe bears the marks of being the product of thoughtful conceptualization for the accomplishment of some purpose.”
The startling implications of the Leibnizian concept of providence then is that a perfect God would bring about his desired ends by "front-loading" the universe through nomically regular means that would be empirically equivalent to a world in which the origin and nature of life on Earth would be empiriclly equivalent to what we might expect on naturalism, at least, according to Draper. This means that if God could accomplish something through non-miraculous means then he would.
2) Draper assume that God could create any and all autonomous biological life ex nihilo with the dispositions, abilities, nature, etc. that lifeforms currently have. However, I do not think this is at all plausibly the case. The reason is that there aren't any laws of nature in biology. So whereas God could create physical objects that behave according to the laws of physics and chemistry ex nihilo, biological creatures on the other hand cannot be so created because there aren't any laws of nature in biology. This is the case even if the behavior of biological creatures is determined because that behavior itself is not a law of nature. Thus, if evolution were metaphysically necessary that would not confirm naturalism over theism in any of the ways that Draper outlines since natural selection cannot operate unless there are winners and losers.
3) Drapers assumes that Christian theism is a worldview in which moral progress is something we are supposed to do completely on our own, with our only resources being the self-centered nature we have inherited from our evolutionary heritage. However, on Christian theism, unlike any other major world religion, it is noted that we are incapable all on our own to make significant moral progress apart from the supernatural assistance of the Holy Spirit.
4) Draper also makes a bizarre claim for which he offers no justification, and which seems absurd, namely, that our knowledge of our environment is better than our moral knowledge of right and wrong, and our religious knowledge. As best I can tell, Draper finds moral and religious confusion in the world surprising on theism since God would be concerned about our moral knowledge, and especially concerned with making His revelation, and hence one true religion plainly clear amongst all of the world's religion; especially since one's eternal destiny hangs in the balance. If anything, our moral knowledge is easier to come by than most other kinds of knowledge, including knowledge of our environment for survival since as Stephen Pinker and other have demonstrated:
"The idea that the moral sense is an innate part of human nature is not far-fetched. A list of human universals collected by the anthropologist Donald E. Brown includes many moral concepts and emotions, including a distinction between right and wrong; empathy; fairness; admiration of generosity; rights and obligations; proscription of murder, rape and other forms of violence; redress of wrongs; sanctions for wrongs against the community; shame; and taboos...The moral sense, then, may be rooted in the design of the normal human brain."
(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?pagewanted=3&sq=pinker&scp=1)
OR Another alternative would be to follow Patricia Churchland's Book:
http://www.amazon.com/Braintrust-Neuroscience-Tells-about-Morality/dp/0691156344/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1352238361&sr=1-1&keywords=patricia+churchland+moral
Now, of course this knowledge is more coarse-grained than fine-grained, but so is the kind of knowledge that Draper allegedly thinks we know better than moral knowledge; indeed, it is more so. So, I find it ironic that it is in virtue of our evolutionary heritage that we have easy, nay, instinctual moral knowledge!; could it be any better than that?
What about his undefended argument from religious confusion?
First, how does the fact that others falsely claim to have a veridical experience of God undermine my experience of God? Logically, that does nothing to undermine a veridical experience of God unless one adopts an Equal Weight View in the Epistemology of Disagreement. But we know that 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.
The best way to spin this objection is as follows: The presence of false claims to the Holy Spirit ought to undermine my confidence in the reliability of my cognitive faculties since so many others apparently have gone wrong despite their sincerity.
Response: The Christian doesn't have to say that all religious experience is completely spurious. It may well be that adherents of other religions due have veridical experiences of god to a certain measure (the ground of all being, the moral absolute, the loving father of mankind). Also, this objection assumes that Christian religious experience is exactly the same as all other religious experience, but this is clearly false. For example, the Buddhist feels like they lose their identity and melt into the all encompassing oneness of reality. Why think that a Muslim, or Mormon experience of God is indistinguishable from a Christian? Go ahead and test it by asking people who convert from Islam to Christianity. I hazard to say that the phenomenoloigical experience reported in the vast majority of these cases will turn out to be unique and distinct from other kinds of religious experiences.
Third, if Jesus was resurrected from the dead as a vindication of his allegedly blasphemous claims to be the personal embodiment of YHWH, then it is false that God hasn't revealed himself uniquely and clearly in human history. This can be known both in a properly basic manner and in an evidential manner. Once we see this, I think we can see that a false assumption of this objection is: If god did reveal himself clearly in human history, then there wouldn't be a variety of religions in the world, but even Schellenberg denies this has to be the case in his book: Human Reason and Divine Hiddenness (182) he seeks to answer the following question:
"...If a strong epistemic situation in relation to theism were to obtain, [would] human religiousness would be reduced to a narrow and stifling uniformity? ...what is likely to follow from God presenting himself to the experience of all individuals capable of recognizing him in the manner desribed in Chapter 2 is not a uniform pattern of religiousness, but rather patterns of religious life that are (at one level at least) compatible, united under a common acceptance of God as personal and loving. Even this may be saying to much. For if humans would remian free to reject god, as I have argued they would, there would presumably remain the possibility of religious beliefs and practices incompatible at all levels with traditions built up on the experience of god, resulting directly or indirectly from the rejection of that experience by some individual(s) at some point in time."
The objector might persist and say, but still, even supposing there really is a Holy Spirit, is it surprising that other people in the world claim to have spurious experiences of God? There is mounting evidence that we are naturally disposed to form belief in an omni-God as a result of our biology. Even though culture could influence the contents of a persons professed belief , we find that when we have the same person conceive of the divine apart from their respective narrative particular to their culture, it turns out that they actually believe in an omni-God.
--Natural Born Believers
(Experimental evidence, including cross-cultural studies, suggests that three-year-olds attribute super, god-like qualities to lots of different beings. Super-power, super-knowledge and super-perception seem to be default assumptions. Children then have to learn that mother is fallible, and dad is not all powerful, and that people will die. So children may be particularly receptive to the idea of a super creator-god. It fits their predilections.)
--Conceptualizing a Nonnatural Entity: Anthropomorphism in God Concepts
JUSTIN L. BARRETT AND FRANK C. KEIL
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/readinggroup/barrett1996.pdf
Cornell University
The data suggest that subjects possess and use at least two different parallel God concepts depending on the context (although one may actually be an empty concept), but there is no obvious reason why these two concepts exist. Perhaps stories involving an atemporal and omnipotent agent create processing difficulties, and an efficient way to deal with the problem is to use a simpler God concept to understand stories.
5) What about the languishing of sentient life?
http://www.reasons.org/articles/thank-god-for-carnivores
http://www.reasons.org/articles/animal-death-prevents-ecological-meltdown
http://www.reasons.org/articles/why-would-a-good-god-create-parasites
http://www.reasons.org/podcasts/science-news-flash/global-eco-crisis-loss-of-big-predators-disrupts-earth-s-ecosystem
http://www.reasons.org/podcasts/science-news-flash/predators-essential-for-life-s-diversity
SCOPE: Draper's discussion of the comparative scope of naturalism compared to theism relies on a theory of probability which is rejected by almost all probability theorists today, in part because the probabilities that it yields are dependent upon arbitrary choices made by the theorist and are therefore not objective. Many other approaches to probabilistic reasoning have been developed which do not share the failings of Draper's approach,and these do not support his key premiss.
SIMPLICITY: Simplicity only helps adjudicate between equally explanatory hypotheses after such theories have been confirmed by experience. As a logical principle, Occam's razor would demand that scientists accept the simplest possible theoretical explanation for existing data. However, science has shown repeatedly that future data often supports more complex theories than existing data. Science tends to prefer the simplest explanation that is consistent with the data available at a given time, but history shows that these simplest explanations often yield to complexities as new data become available. The point about simplicity then is that we must first establish our data, and if there are competing hypotheses that have equal explanatory power, then we should appeal to simplicity. Draper does just the reverse however, and argues that naturalism is a prior simpler than theism. This is a gross misuse of simplicity. In any case, theism is a priori simpler than naturalism because whereas the universe is complex, and composed of several disparate parts, God is one thing, who is nowhere near as complex as the universe because He isn't composed of any parts.
The second misstep occurs when Draper conflates simplicity with unification. On the unification approach, an event is explained by deriving the occurrence of the event using a theory that unifies many diverse phenomena, and thereby showing that the event is part of a very general, perhaps utterly pervasive, pattern of events in the universe. The unifying power of a theory increases in proportion to the following properties of the theory:
1. Generality, the number of actual phenomena that can be derived using the theory,
2. Simplicity, and
3. Cohesion.
This third desideratum has been characterized in a number of ways. The aim of the desideratum is to discriminate against theories that, rather than picking out real patterns of phenomena, pick out mere unpatterned conjunctions of phenomena (or perhaps even worse, all possible phenomena). Kitcher’s version of a cohesion principle is his stringency requirement. Morrison (2000) presents an account of cohesion (for non-explanatory purposes) on which cohesive theories use a single parameter or set of parameters in all their explanations. While it is true that simplicity appears as one of three properties that go towards a theory having unifying power, notice that simplicity is secondary to generality, or explanatory scope. Thus, once again, Draper begs the question because He hasn't shown us that naturalism has equal or greater unification compared to theism (Note: He use of the word scope above is not the same as explanatory scope).
Thus, Draper has made illegitmate use of scope and simplicity and has so far skipped the hard work of trying to offer any actual evidence for naturalism over theism. To his credit, he does attempt that task in the second part of his paper, namely with respect to E where he argues that naturalism has greater predictive power with respect to Darwinian evolution compared to theism. Now, I have already responded to Draper's E and other observations in my other post on my blog under: Defeating Draper's Argument from Evil, but let me offer additional defeaters here as well.
1) Draper’s arguments, though he may not be aware of it, assumes a Newtonian version of divine providence which suffers from “the underachieving problem” where if we saw numerous divine interventions in the world on the part of some divine being, then these numerous interventions would constitute supreme empirical evidence that such a God was not the greatest of all conceivable beings. Consider the following passage from Michael Murray’s article Natural Providence: Reply to Dembski,
“As I cast the exchange between Newton and Leibniz on the issue of providence over nature, Leibniz makes heavy weather over the fact that the Newtonian God appears to be a designer of less than adequate competence. What sort of God would actualize a creation which would require periodic intervention to keep things from collapsing into disorder and chaos? Leibniz’s answer: only one with less than perfect knowledge, power, or goodness.
There is something very attractive about this position. When I bought my first car, the manufacturer recommended a tune up every twenty thousand miles or so. Cars rolling off the assembly line today hardly need anything like a tune up. With many of these cars, the sort of routine service that would be required every twenty thousand miles need only be done every fifty or one hundred thousand miles. Better engineers with greater understanding and better raw materials are now producing better cars. And I think we suppose that were General Motors to take on a few omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good engineers, cars would be utterly maintenance free (less than wholly good engineers might be able to design such cars, but undoubtedly their greed would get the better of them). The same intuition underlies the Leibnizian picture. If God knows how to bring about all of the states of affairs he wishes to bring about in the course of natural history by deck-staking, what would motivate the creation of a universe that was in need of periodic tune ups?
Christian have argued, that there is something unworthy of a theism which countenances a God who once creates the natural order and yet leaves it without the resources to bring about the desired results. The most vocal advocate of this line in the contemporary arena is
Howard Van Till who argues:
I believe that the universe in its present form is to be seen as a potentiality of the creation that has been actualized by the exercise of its God-given creaturely capabilities. For this to be possible, however, the creation’s formational economy must be astoundingly robust and gapless—lacking none of the resources or capabilities necessary to make possible the sort of continuous actualization of new structures and life forms as now envisioned by the natural sciences. The optimally-equipped character of the universe’s formational economy is, I believe, a vivid manifestation of the fact that it is the product, not of mere accident or happenstance, as the worldview of naturalism would have it, but of intention. In other words, the universe bears the marks of being the product of thoughtful conceptualization for the accomplishment of some purpose.”
The startling implications of the Leibnizian concept of providence then is that a perfect God would bring about his desired ends by "front-loading" the universe through nomically regular means that would be empirically equivalent to a world in which the origin and nature of life on Earth would be empiriclly equivalent to what we might expect on naturalism, at least, according to Draper. This means that if God could accomplish something through non-miraculous means then he would.
2) Draper assume that God could create any and all autonomous biological life ex nihilo with the dispositions, abilities, nature, etc. that lifeforms currently have. However, I do not think this is at all plausibly the case. The reason is that there aren't any laws of nature in biology. So whereas God could create physical objects that behave according to the laws of physics and chemistry ex nihilo, biological creatures on the other hand cannot be so created because there aren't any laws of nature in biology. This is the case even if the behavior of biological creatures is determined because that behavior itself is not a law of nature. Thus, if evolution were metaphysically necessary that would not confirm naturalism over theism in any of the ways that Draper outlines since natural selection cannot operate unless there are winners and losers.
3) Drapers assumes that Christian theism is a worldview in which moral progress is something we are supposed to do completely on our own, with our only resources being the self-centered nature we have inherited from our evolutionary heritage. However, on Christian theism, unlike any other major world religion, it is noted that we are incapable all on our own to make significant moral progress apart from the supernatural assistance of the Holy Spirit.
4) Draper also makes a bizarre claim for which he offers no justification, and which seems absurd, namely, that our knowledge of our environment is better than our moral knowledge of right and wrong, and our religious knowledge. As best I can tell, Draper finds moral and religious confusion in the world surprising on theism since God would be concerned about our moral knowledge, and especially concerned with making His revelation, and hence one true religion plainly clear amongst all of the world's religion; especially since one's eternal destiny hangs in the balance. If anything, our moral knowledge is easier to come by than most other kinds of knowledge, including knowledge of our environment for survival since as Stephen Pinker and other have demonstrated:
"The idea that the moral sense is an innate part of human nature is not far-fetched. A list of human universals collected by the anthropologist Donald E. Brown includes many moral concepts and emotions, including a distinction between right and wrong; empathy; fairness; admiration of generosity; rights and obligations; proscription of murder, rape and other forms of violence; redress of wrongs; sanctions for wrongs against the community; shame; and taboos...The moral sense, then, may be rooted in the design of the normal human brain."
(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?pagewanted=3&sq=pinker&scp=1)
OR Another alternative would be to follow Patricia Churchland's Book:
http://www.amazon.com/Braintrust-Neuroscience-Tells-about-Morality/dp/0691156344/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1352238361&sr=1-1&keywords=patricia+churchland+moral
Now, of course this knowledge is more coarse-grained than fine-grained, but so is the kind of knowledge that Draper allegedly thinks we know better than moral knowledge; indeed, it is more so. So, I find it ironic that it is in virtue of our evolutionary heritage that we have easy, nay, instinctual moral knowledge!; could it be any better than that?
What about his undefended argument from religious confusion?
First, how does the fact that others falsely claim to have a veridical experience of God undermine my experience of God? Logically, that does nothing to undermine a veridical experience of God unless one adopts an Equal Weight View in the Epistemology of Disagreement. But we know that 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.
The best way to spin this objection is as follows: The presence of false claims to the Holy Spirit ought to undermine my confidence in the reliability of my cognitive faculties since so many others apparently have gone wrong despite their sincerity.
Response: The Christian doesn't have to say that all religious experience is completely spurious. It may well be that adherents of other religions due have veridical experiences of god to a certain measure (the ground of all being, the moral absolute, the loving father of mankind). Also, this objection assumes that Christian religious experience is exactly the same as all other religious experience, but this is clearly false. For example, the Buddhist feels like they lose their identity and melt into the all encompassing oneness of reality. Why think that a Muslim, or Mormon experience of God is indistinguishable from a Christian? Go ahead and test it by asking people who convert from Islam to Christianity. I hazard to say that the phenomenoloigical experience reported in the vast majority of these cases will turn out to be unique and distinct from other kinds of religious experiences.
Third, if Jesus was resurrected from the dead as a vindication of his allegedly blasphemous claims to be the personal embodiment of YHWH, then it is false that God hasn't revealed himself uniquely and clearly in human history. This can be known both in a properly basic manner and in an evidential manner. Once we see this, I think we can see that a false assumption of this objection is: If god did reveal himself clearly in human history, then there wouldn't be a variety of religions in the world, but even Schellenberg denies this has to be the case in his book: Human Reason and Divine Hiddenness (182) he seeks to answer the following question:
"...If a strong epistemic situation in relation to theism were to obtain, [would] human religiousness would be reduced to a narrow and stifling uniformity? ...what is likely to follow from God presenting himself to the experience of all individuals capable of recognizing him in the manner desribed in Chapter 2 is not a uniform pattern of religiousness, but rather patterns of religious life that are (at one level at least) compatible, united under a common acceptance of God as personal and loving. Even this may be saying to much. For if humans would remian free to reject god, as I have argued they would, there would presumably remain the possibility of religious beliefs and practices incompatible at all levels with traditions built up on the experience of god, resulting directly or indirectly from the rejection of that experience by some individual(s) at some point in time."
The objector might persist and say, but still, even supposing there really is a Holy Spirit, is it surprising that other people in the world claim to have spurious experiences of God? There is mounting evidence that we are naturally disposed to form belief in an omni-God as a result of our biology. Even though culture could influence the contents of a persons professed belief , we find that when we have the same person conceive of the divine apart from their respective narrative particular to their culture, it turns out that they actually believe in an omni-God.
--Natural Born Believers
(Experimental evidence, including cross-cultural studies, suggests that three-year-olds attribute super, god-like qualities to lots of different beings. Super-power, super-knowledge and super-perception seem to be default assumptions. Children then have to learn that mother is fallible, and dad is not all powerful, and that people will die. So children may be particularly receptive to the idea of a super creator-god. It fits their predilections.)
--Conceptualizing a Nonnatural Entity: Anthropomorphism in God Concepts
JUSTIN L. BARRETT AND FRANK C. KEIL
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/readinggroup/barrett1996.pdf
Cornell University
The data suggest that subjects possess and use at least two different parallel God concepts depending on the context (although one may actually be an empty concept), but there is no obvious reason why these two concepts exist. Perhaps stories involving an atemporal and omnipotent agent create processing difficulties, and an efficient way to deal with the problem is to use a simpler God concept to understand stories.
5) What about the languishing of sentient life?
http://www.reasons.org/articles/thank-god-for-carnivores
http://www.reasons.org/articles/animal-death-prevents-ecological-meltdown
http://www.reasons.org/articles/why-would-a-good-god-create-parasites
http://www.reasons.org/podcasts/science-news-flash/global-eco-crisis-loss-of-big-predators-disrupts-earth-s-ecosystem
http://www.reasons.org/podcasts/science-news-flash/predators-essential-for-life-s-diversity
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