BELIEF IN GOD AS PROPERLY BASIC
1. Beliefs which are appropriately grounded may be rationally accepted as basic beliefs not grounded on argument.
2. Belief that the biblical God exists is appropriately grounded.
3. Therefore, belief that the biblical God exists may be rationally accepted as a basic belief not grounded on argument.
1. Beliefs which are appropriately grounded may be rationally accepted as basic beliefs not grounded on argument.
2. Belief that the biblical God exists is appropriately grounded.
3. Therefore, belief that the biblical God exists may be rationally accepted as a basic belief not grounded on argument.
BELIEF IN GOD AS PROPERLY BASIC
1. Beliefs which are appropriately grounded may be rationally
accepted as basic beliefs not grounded on argument.
a. Properly basic beliefs characterized
--Properly Basic- Beliefs that aren’t based on or inferred from other beliefs, they are part of your foundation (i.e. external world, physical objects in it, reality of the past, presence of other minds; beliefs like this can’t be proven on the basis of other beliefs; for example, how do you know that you aren’t just a body in a matrix or virtual reality; or that the world wasn’t created five minutes ago with built in memory traces and food in your stomachs; or how could you prove that other people aren’t soulless robots with no interior life?)
b. Properly basic beliefs not arbitrary
--Although these beliefs are basic, that doesn’t mean that they are arbitrary, rather, they are properly grounded in that they are reliably formed in the context of certain experiences. Thus, it is rational to hold these basic beliefs unless you have a defeater for your basic belief; thus they are not indubitable. You can know that God exists without making an inference from a more basic premise. Belief in God is part of your foundation that is grounded in experience, but it isn’t an argument from experience. This is how people in the Bible knew that God exists. God wasn’t an inferred entity, He was an experienced reality that gave significance to their lives.
2. Belief that the biblical God exists is appropriately grounded.
a.The Inner Witness of the Holy Spirit
--The experience of the Holy Spirit is veridical, that is, an experience of a genuine reality. It is unmistakable for the person has it, and who fully attends to it. That doesn’t mean that the Holy Spirit is irresistible, and indubitable. Such a person, doesn’t need arguments in order to rationally believe in God; such arguments are sufficient, but not necessary. The Holy Spirit is the immediate experience of god himself. In certain contexts of the experiencing the Holy Spirit, will imply that apprehend certain truths about God: god loves me, god forgives me through Christ, Christ lives within me, etc. Such an experience gives a person both a subjective assurance and an objective knowledge of Christian theism. Lastly, arguments and evidence that are incompatible with these truths are overwhelmed by the experience of the Holy Spirit for the person who fully attends to it.
New Testament Material Pertinent to the Witness of the Holy Spirit in the Life of a Believer:
Galatians 3:26; 4:6--When a person becomes a Christian they are automatically indwelt and regenerated by the Holy Spirit
Rom. 8:15-16—It is through the Holy Spirit that we have confidence that we are God’s children.
Col. 2:2; 1 Thess. 1:5—Complete confidence, and assurance of the knowledge of the truth of salvation through the Holy Spirit
1 John 2:20,27—It is the anointing of the Holy Spirit that teaches the believer the truth of divine things.
John 14:26—Teaching ministry in the heart of the Christian
Entails knowledge of essential truths of the Gospel:
God has forgiven me, Christ has reconciled me to God, I am a child of God, God exists, Christ has been resurrected, etc.
John 14:16-17, 20—Indwelling Holy Spirit that will give us assurance of being united with the Jesus.
1 John 3:24; 4:13—We can have a confident knowledge that we abide in God and He in us.
1 John 5:6-10—If we receive the testimony of man (apostles), the testimony of God is greater.
Even though arguments and evidence can be used to support our faith, they are not the proper basis of our faith. God is the living, not just the conclusion of an argument. Thus, we know our faith is true through the self-authenticating of the Witness of Holy Spirit.
Possible Defeater Verse: 1 John 4:1-3—John isn’t talking about testing the inner witness of the Holy Spirit in your own heart, but rather, testing other people who claim to have the inner witness of the Holy Spirit.
WHAT ABOUT THE ROLE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE LIFE OF AN UNBELIEVER?
John 16:7-11—The ministry of the Holy Spirit to the unbeliever is three fold: 1) Sin 2) Righteousness of God 3) Condemnation before this righteous God; entails that God exists, I am guilty, I need god’s forgiveness.
Rom. 3:10-11—If it weren’t for the work of the Holy Spirit no man would become a Christian
1 Cor. 2:14—Natural man isn’t even able to understand spiritual things; indeed, he thinks they are foolishness
Rom. 8:7—Natural man has his mind set on the flesh, and is therefore hostile to God, natural man does not and cannot set his heart on God’s law
John 6:44—No one can come to me unless the father draws him; God is drawing people to himself via the Holy Spirit
When a person doesn’t come to Christ, it is never for a proclaimed lack of evidence. At root, such a person ignores and deliberately rejects the drawing of God via the Holy Spirit on his heart.
John 7:16-17—If any man’s will is to do His will, then He will know whether the teaching is from God, or whether I am speaking on my own authority.
The ultimate basis for knowledge of God then, is the same for the both believer and unbeliever; the Holy Spirit.
b. Warrant and Christian Belief
--What about a person who was a Christian, then apostatizes:
1) He or she wasn’t really born-again.
2) That person really was a regenerate Christian, and because of sin, has committed apostasy; the witness of the Holy Spirit isn’t indubitable, irresistible, we can grieve and quench the Holy Spirit, and ultimately, you can cast the Holy Spirit out of your life (Hebrews).
--What is the Role of Reason then?
Magisterial and Ministerial Use of Reason: Reason judges the gospel (magisterial) vs. reason submits to and serves the gospel
Message (ministerial); In light of the Holy Spirit’s use of reason, reason is a tool that helps us better understand and defend the gospel.
--If the believer has an additional ground for belief in the gospel through apologetics, then such a person would have a double warrant which results in a number of benefits:
1) More confidence in the truth of the gospel
2) May embolden a believer to share the gospel
3) May predispose the unbeliever to accept the gospel
4) May support a believer in times of doubt and spiritual dryness.
But, should there ever arise a conflict between reason and the Holy Spirit, you should always choose the witness of the Holy Spirit. For example, suppose you are raised in communism Russia where you have no access or response to the arguments from atheism that you hear, you are rational to choose the witness of the Holy Spirit.
c. Defeaters and Christian Belief
--Properly Basic beliefs can be defeated by arguments and evidence brought up against them. In order to remain rational in the face of a defeater, one has to have a defeater-defeater.
--However, what about a person who doesn’t have access to a defeater-defeater? Plantinga says the original belief, has so much intrinsic warrant, that it constitutes an intrinsic defeater-defeater against any defeater brought against your original belief. He gives an example of being in a courtroom with evidence being presented that you committed a crime and even if you do not have a good defeater-defeater to the defeater, you still know that you didn’t commit the crime (although clearly, there is something that could and should be said, you just don’t know what it is at the time). This is not a claim that you should believe something contrary to reason, rather, when you are in a situation in which a defeater is brought against your belief that you can’t answer, then you can still know via the witness of the Holy Spirit that Christianity is still true, but you lack the relevant expertise to reply to some particular defeater brought against Christianity.
--Can Belief in Atheism Also Be Properly Basic?
Atheism cannot be a properly basic belief since properly basic beliefs are formed in the context of some experience wherein something that objectively exists and impinges itself upon us from the outside such belief in the reality of the external world, other minds, and the reality of the past.
--Is a Properly Basic Belief in God the Same as Fideism?
No. A properly basic belief is not one that is arbitrary or something that you will against reason. Rather, a properly basic belief is one that grounded in your immediate experience of God, and is part of the deliverances of reason that provides prima facie support for belief in God that we are warranted in accepting.
--How do you deal with the Muslim, or Mormon who claims that their religion is true?
First, how does the fact that others falsely claim to have a veridical experience of God undermine my experience of God? Suppose there really is a Holy Spirit, is it surprising that other people in the world claim to have spurious experiences 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 phenomenological 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 described 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 too much. For if humans would remain 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 UniversityThe 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.
3. Therefore, belief that the biblical God exists may be rationally accepted as a basic belief not grounded on argument.
1. Beliefs which are appropriately grounded may be rationally
accepted as basic beliefs not grounded on argument.
a. Properly basic beliefs characterized
--Properly Basic- Beliefs that aren’t based on or inferred from other beliefs, they are part of your foundation (i.e. external world, physical objects in it, reality of the past, presence of other minds; beliefs like this can’t be proven on the basis of other beliefs; for example, how do you know that you aren’t just a body in a matrix or virtual reality; or that the world wasn’t created five minutes ago with built in memory traces and food in your stomachs; or how could you prove that other people aren’t soulless robots with no interior life?)
b. Properly basic beliefs not arbitrary
--Although these beliefs are basic, that doesn’t mean that they are arbitrary, rather, they are properly grounded in that they are reliably formed in the context of certain experiences. Thus, it is rational to hold these basic beliefs unless you have a defeater for your basic belief; thus they are not indubitable. You can know that God exists without making an inference from a more basic premise. Belief in God is part of your foundation that is grounded in experience, but it isn’t an argument from experience. This is how people in the Bible knew that God exists. God wasn’t an inferred entity, He was an experienced reality that gave significance to their lives.
2. Belief that the biblical God exists is appropriately grounded.
a.The Inner Witness of the Holy Spirit
--The experience of the Holy Spirit is veridical, that is, an experience of a genuine reality. It is unmistakable for the person has it, and who fully attends to it. That doesn’t mean that the Holy Spirit is irresistible, and indubitable. Such a person, doesn’t need arguments in order to rationally believe in God; such arguments are sufficient, but not necessary. The Holy Spirit is the immediate experience of god himself. In certain contexts of the experiencing the Holy Spirit, will imply that apprehend certain truths about God: god loves me, god forgives me through Christ, Christ lives within me, etc. Such an experience gives a person both a subjective assurance and an objective knowledge of Christian theism. Lastly, arguments and evidence that are incompatible with these truths are overwhelmed by the experience of the Holy Spirit for the person who fully attends to it.
New Testament Material Pertinent to the Witness of the Holy Spirit in the Life of a Believer:
Galatians 3:26; 4:6--When a person becomes a Christian they are automatically indwelt and regenerated by the Holy Spirit
Rom. 8:15-16—It is through the Holy Spirit that we have confidence that we are God’s children.
Col. 2:2; 1 Thess. 1:5—Complete confidence, and assurance of the knowledge of the truth of salvation through the Holy Spirit
1 John 2:20,27—It is the anointing of the Holy Spirit that teaches the believer the truth of divine things.
John 14:26—Teaching ministry in the heart of the Christian
Entails knowledge of essential truths of the Gospel:
God has forgiven me, Christ has reconciled me to God, I am a child of God, God exists, Christ has been resurrected, etc.
John 14:16-17, 20—Indwelling Holy Spirit that will give us assurance of being united with the Jesus.
1 John 3:24; 4:13—We can have a confident knowledge that we abide in God and He in us.
1 John 5:6-10—If we receive the testimony of man (apostles), the testimony of God is greater.
Even though arguments and evidence can be used to support our faith, they are not the proper basis of our faith. God is the living, not just the conclusion of an argument. Thus, we know our faith is true through the self-authenticating of the Witness of Holy Spirit.
Possible Defeater Verse: 1 John 4:1-3—John isn’t talking about testing the inner witness of the Holy Spirit in your own heart, but rather, testing other people who claim to have the inner witness of the Holy Spirit.
WHAT ABOUT THE ROLE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE LIFE OF AN UNBELIEVER?
John 16:7-11—The ministry of the Holy Spirit to the unbeliever is three fold: 1) Sin 2) Righteousness of God 3) Condemnation before this righteous God; entails that God exists, I am guilty, I need god’s forgiveness.
Rom. 3:10-11—If it weren’t for the work of the Holy Spirit no man would become a Christian
1 Cor. 2:14—Natural man isn’t even able to understand spiritual things; indeed, he thinks they are foolishness
Rom. 8:7—Natural man has his mind set on the flesh, and is therefore hostile to God, natural man does not and cannot set his heart on God’s law
John 6:44—No one can come to me unless the father draws him; God is drawing people to himself via the Holy Spirit
When a person doesn’t come to Christ, it is never for a proclaimed lack of evidence. At root, such a person ignores and deliberately rejects the drawing of God via the Holy Spirit on his heart.
John 7:16-17—If any man’s will is to do His will, then He will know whether the teaching is from God, or whether I am speaking on my own authority.
The ultimate basis for knowledge of God then, is the same for the both believer and unbeliever; the Holy Spirit.
b. Warrant and Christian Belief
--What about a person who was a Christian, then apostatizes:
1) He or she wasn’t really born-again.
2) That person really was a regenerate Christian, and because of sin, has committed apostasy; the witness of the Holy Spirit isn’t indubitable, irresistible, we can grieve and quench the Holy Spirit, and ultimately, you can cast the Holy Spirit out of your life (Hebrews).
--What is the Role of Reason then?
Magisterial and Ministerial Use of Reason: Reason judges the gospel (magisterial) vs. reason submits to and serves the gospel
Message (ministerial); In light of the Holy Spirit’s use of reason, reason is a tool that helps us better understand and defend the gospel.
--If the believer has an additional ground for belief in the gospel through apologetics, then such a person would have a double warrant which results in a number of benefits:
1) More confidence in the truth of the gospel
2) May embolden a believer to share the gospel
3) May predispose the unbeliever to accept the gospel
4) May support a believer in times of doubt and spiritual dryness.
But, should there ever arise a conflict between reason and the Holy Spirit, you should always choose the witness of the Holy Spirit. For example, suppose you are raised in communism Russia where you have no access or response to the arguments from atheism that you hear, you are rational to choose the witness of the Holy Spirit.
c. Defeaters and Christian Belief
--Properly Basic beliefs can be defeated by arguments and evidence brought up against them. In order to remain rational in the face of a defeater, one has to have a defeater-defeater.
--However, what about a person who doesn’t have access to a defeater-defeater? Plantinga says the original belief, has so much intrinsic warrant, that it constitutes an intrinsic defeater-defeater against any defeater brought against your original belief. He gives an example of being in a courtroom with evidence being presented that you committed a crime and even if you do not have a good defeater-defeater to the defeater, you still know that you didn’t commit the crime (although clearly, there is something that could and should be said, you just don’t know what it is at the time). This is not a claim that you should believe something contrary to reason, rather, when you are in a situation in which a defeater is brought against your belief that you can’t answer, then you can still know via the witness of the Holy Spirit that Christianity is still true, but you lack the relevant expertise to reply to some particular defeater brought against Christianity.
--Can Belief in Atheism Also Be Properly Basic?
Atheism cannot be a properly basic belief since properly basic beliefs are formed in the context of some experience wherein something that objectively exists and impinges itself upon us from the outside such belief in the reality of the external world, other minds, and the reality of the past.
--Is a Properly Basic Belief in God the Same as Fideism?
No. A properly basic belief is not one that is arbitrary or something that you will against reason. Rather, a properly basic belief is one that grounded in your immediate experience of God, and is part of the deliverances of reason that provides prima facie support for belief in God that we are warranted in accepting.
--How do you deal with the Muslim, or Mormon who claims that their religion is true?
First, how does the fact that others falsely claim to have a veridical experience of God undermine my experience of God? Suppose there really is a Holy Spirit, is it surprising that other people in the world claim to have spurious experiences 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 phenomenological 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 described 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 too much. For if humans would remain 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 UniversityThe 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.
3. Therefore, belief that the biblical God exists may be rationally accepted as a basic belief not grounded on argument.
RSS Feed