Philosophy and Faith

[groovedaddy]

One of my jobs as a teacher of bright, mostly Catholic undergraduates is to get them thinking about why they hold their religious beliefs. It’s easy enough to spark discussion about the problem of evil (“Can you really read the newspaper everyday and continue to believe in an all-perfect God?”) or about the diversity of religious beliefs (“If you’d been born in Saudi Arabia, don’t you think you’d be a Muslim?”). Inevitably, however, the discussion starts to fizzle when someone raises a hand and says (sometimes ardently, sometimes smugly) “But aren’t you forgetting about faith?”

That seems to be enough for most students. The trump card has been played, and they — or at least the many who find religion more a comfort than a burden — happily remember that believing means never having to explain why.

I myself, the product of a dozen years of intellectually self-confident Jesuit education, have little sympathy with the “it’s just faith” response. “How can you say that?” I reply. “You wouldn’t buy a used car just because you had faith in what the salesperson told you. Why would you take on faith far more important claims about your eternal salvation?” And, in fact, most of my students do see their faith not as an intellectually blind leap but as grounded in evidence and argument.

“Well, if there’s no God,” they say, “how can you explain why anything at all exists or why the world is governed by such precise laws of nature?”

At this point, the class perks up again as I lay out versions of the famous arguments for the existence of God, and my students begin to think that they’re about to get what their parents have paid for at a great Catholic university: some rigorous intellectual support for their faith.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/philosophy-and-faith/?th&emc=th

[Jim__]

1. Interesting column.

I think he is wrong in his claim:

An answer may lie in work by philosophers as different as David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Alvin Plantinga. In various ways, they have shown that everyday life is based on “basic” beliefs for which we have no good arguments. There are, for example, no more basic truths from which we can prove that the past is often a good guide to the future, that our memories are reliable, or that other people have a conscious inner life. Such beliefs simply — and quite properly — arise from our experience in the world. Plantinga in particular has argued that core religious beliefs can have a status similar to these basic but unproven beliefs. His argument has clear plausibility for some sorts of religious beliefs. Through experiences of, for example, natural beauty, moral obligation, or loving and being loved, we may develop an abiding sense of the reality of an extraordinarily good and powerful being who cares about us. Who is to say that such experiences do not give reason for belief in God as much as parallel (though different) experiences give reason for belief in reliable knowledge of the past and future and of other human minds? There is still room for philosophical disputes about this line of thought, but it remains the most plausible starting point of a philosophical case for religious belief.

I agree that we cannot prove that we have a reliable memory or that other people are conscious. However, our entire experience tells us that these things are true. We can't prove the truth of our experience, but, it is an extremely strong argument. The question of ultimate existence, however, does not have such a powerful argument to support it. The ultimate questions of existence are completely beyond our experience and we have no real basis for even putting forth an idea.

[trotsky]

2. "believing means never having to explain why"

Boy, ain't that the truth. Even the most "sophisticated" theologians ultimately answer with some variation on that.

However the writer of this article, like so very many believers, is confused about the difference between atheism, theism, and agnosticism. An agnostic does not occupy some kind of middle ground. The typical agnostic is an atheist. Atheists don't have to make their case, theists do. "Agnostics" are just another group of people that theists haven't convinced.

[Silent3]

3. "an entity which possesses maximal greatness"

Following this link (Alvin Plantinga’s modal-logic formulation) from the link in the OP, hoping to find something that lives up to being a better-than-the-usual-stuff argument for the existence of God, I find something that suffers from the same failing I see in many philosophical arguments for God: the bait-and-switch technique of creating a very dry, very abstract definition of "God" that has very little to do with the way most people seem to relate to their concept of God, acting as if proving the one provides support for the other.

So what if "an entity which possesses maximal greatness" exists? And "great" in what sense? Greatness is contextual, and there's no context to decide great for what, or great at what.

Maybe the thing God is greatest at is not existing. :)

Even if you grant that this particular argument for God holds water, how do you get from the existence of this very abstract God to thinking that "an entity which possesses maximal greatness" wants or cares if you pray to it? That it has particular sets of rules it wants humans to live by? That it's in the business of granting life after death, and deciding if your afterlife is going to be pleasant or not?

[Jim__]

4. You say there is not context to decide what "greatness" means.

Based on the argument, we don't have to know what "greatness" means. "Greatness" in the argument is not defined as a separate entity, but rather as a part of the phrase, "maximal greatness". "Maximal greatness" is defined:

Say that an entity possesses “maximal excellence” if and only if it is omnipotent, omnscient, and morally perfect. Say, further, that an entity possesses “maximal greatness” if and only if it possesses maximal excellence in every possible world—that is, if and only if it is necessarily existent and necessarily maximally excellent.

The cited text states that the argument is not convincing, which I believe fits with what the column is arguing.

[Silent3]

5. "Morally perfect" is a highly debatable thing, however.

Further, even if you can define the concepts of "omnipotent" and "omniscient" is self-consistent ways, the existence of those qualities as anything but abstractions, as qualities that must be manifest, is highly debatable.

It's one thing to imagine, for example, "the world's fastest runner". Define a particular metric for running speed and everyone who runs will have some rank by that metric, at least hypothetically. There's got to be one person who ranks higher than everyone else (or perhaps a few in a tie for first place). For whatever scale you can imagine, if that scale measures a real and clearly definable thing, there will be a top to that scale, and at least one embodiment of that top ranking value.

I think the appeal of this particular theological argument is supposed to be that on the scale of "greatness", there has to be something that is greatest, and that greatest thing would be God.

As soon as you involve properties like "omnipotence" and "omniscience", however, you've broken that paradigm, as if you're no longer talking about "the world's fastest runner", but "the runner who can run a mile in 0.2 seconds" -- an entity very unlikely to exist, certainly without any foreordained necessity of existence.

The cited text states that the argument is not convincing, which I believe fits with what the column is arguing.

The article is also trying to make the case that there are more sophisticated arguments for God that atheists aren't typically prepared to handle. If this "modal-logic formulation" is supposed to be an example of something that would stump a person like Richard Dawkins, I'm not impressed.

[Jim__]

6. All he says about Dawkins is that consensus opinion does not support his position.

In these popular debates about God’s existence, the winners are neither theists nor atheists, but agnostics — the neglected step-children of religious controversy, who rightly point out that neither side in the debate has made its case. This is the position supported by the consensus of expert philosophical opinion.

This conclusion should particularly discomfit popular proponents of atheism, such as Richard Dawkins, whose position is entirely based on demonstrably faulty arguments. Believers, of course, can fall back on the logically less rigorous support that they characterize as faith. But then they need to reflect on just what sort of support faith can give to religious belief. How are my students’ warm feelings of certainty as they hug one another at Sunday Mass in their dorm really any different from the trust they might experience while under the spell of a really plausible salesperson?

His more general point is summarized is the final paragraph:

I am not saying that religious believers are in principle incapable of finding satisfactory answers to such questions. I am saying that philosophy and religion can and must speak to each other, and that those who take their beliefs seriously need to reflect on these questions, and that contemporary philosophical discussions (following on Hume and Wittgenstein) about knowledge, belief, certainty and disagreement are highly relevant to such reflection — and potentially, to an individual’s belief. This is what I will try to convey to my students the next time I teach introductory philosophy of religion.

[Silent3]

7. Exactly which position of Dawkins is not supported?

By consensus of whom? What makes consensus a good or reasonable standard here?

[Jim__]

8. His practical certainty that there is no god. - n/t

[Silent3]

9. Is there any particular reason to rate the possibility...

...of a deity as higher than a mere hypothetical possibility? Higher than invisible pink unicorns or Russel's Teapot?

By what definition of God? By those that are so vague they mean practically anything "out there" beyond our current knowledge and understanding?

I'm sure Dawkins, like myself and many other atheists, would gladly admit that as a species and as individuals there's a lot we don't know about or understand yet. Many atheists could in fact be theists under the terms of some very, very broad definitions of deity, such as "important stuff we don't know yet".

Can you suggest a meaning for the word "God" that's specific enough to be more than a synonym for human ignorance or the natural universe itself, yet is still worthy of a higher probability rating than the typical atheist gives, say, a literal take on God of the Christian Bible?