One general objection to theistic arguments for God is that no such argument could be based on the subjective experience of one’s own cognitive processes, and that therefore it suggests delusions of grandeur to think that one can get from such a basis to God necessarily existing.
But to deny that a sound argument could be based on one’s subjective experience of one’s own cognitive processes is self-exempting if it is -itself- claimed to arbitrate the status of that experience in relation to such an argument. This is the same old self-referential inconsistency that itself claims to be above that which it is itself an instance of by sheer force of the domain of its subject term.
The delusion of grandeur is in thinking that one has the logical standing to predicate the -denial- of such an inferential move with any authority beyond one’s -own- cognitive subjectivity by exempting oneself from that alleged limitation in order to make that trans-subjective claim and thus pass judgment on the entire scope and limits of that very subjectivity itself for all thinking subjects.
Moreover, how could one’s own subjectivity be capable of such a universal claim about what one can or cannot know or infer, if subjectivity itself is as self-limited as that claim itself asserts? Especially when no argument or criteria is ever even mentioned.
In fact, how does this differ from a religious-like admonition: “Believe in my arbitrarily subjective self-stultifying claims about the possibility of knowledge and thou shalt be saved”?
In other words, how does an unargued self-contradictory prohibition on everyone’s thinking differ from the religious proof-texting of an arbitrarily-protected claim that restricts all other claims except itself?
Such self-exemption is never mentioned for a reason, although not a logical one.
Tags: Atheism · Faith and Reason · Objectivism · Subjectivism · Theism19 Comments
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
It’s good to have a post on subjectivity in religion. A much neglected topic in philosophy by sceptics and religionists alike
I’m looking forward to the discussion.
Great post; it brings to mind Kierkegaard’s (admittedly pseudonymous) arguments in Fear and Trembling about the teleological suspension of the ethical. Before a Christian objectivist fully discounts subjectivism, there are several obstacles that need to be overcome, including this one.
If you’ve never seen the movie Frailty, I would suggest checking it out. It’s a strong ride through this sort of topic.
I agree, and think the general objection, as you phrase it, is obviously a bad one.
Every belief inside our heads, once you get down all the way to the bottom, rests on a foundation of subjective experience and intuition. So making a wide sweeping claim like “belief X is false because its based on subjective cognitive processes” is self-defeating.
But one thing we are pretty sure of, according to the intuitions and beliefs we trust most… is that there are flaws in our cognitive equipment, that cause us to believe things that are not true. So while its no good to say that “belief X is false because its based on subjective equipment”, we do have to examine the reliability of the cognitive steps that produced belief X.
In the case of strong convictions that God exists, there are many a strong reason to reject your intuitions. Not the least of which is the variety of mutually exclusive religious beliefs held by people who also have strong personal convictions that their beliefs are true.
If one hopes to have any greater claim to truth that others with mutually exclusive intuitions, one will have to use other tools in the toolbox. Science, evidence, reason, logic, history, etc… once you do that, you’re no longer simply relying on purely subjective cognitive faculties (sort of).
I don’t see why a variety of mutually exclusive beliefs, however strong they are, would imply anything about the truth-value of any of those beliefs, any more than different answers by different individuals to the same math problem would imply anything about the correctness or incorrectness of any of those proposed answers.
Moreover, if people differ about the claim that mutually exclusive beliefs imply falseness of those beliefs, would that mean that that implication itself is false?
In fact, it’s difficult to see how flaws in our cognitive equipment could be recognized without some background criteria and authority that is itself assumed to be flawless in that recognition itself. And the same would apply to the recognition of falsity in certain beliefs: there’s always a backdrop of infallibility assumed, however ad hoc and itself potentially mistaken, for the same would apply to that potential mistakenness, and so on. There’s always an assumed God’s-eye-view vantage point we simply cannot preemptively question without assuming.
Eluros, thanks for the film recommendation. I’ll check it out.
Machinephilosophy:
Let me try to rephrase a little more clearly (hopefully).
Given a set of beliefs which are mutually exclusive (ie, if x is true, y & z must be false, etc), you know, at best there can be only one true belief in the set. The other possibility is that all of them are false.
If many of those different mutually exclusive beliefs originate from the same cognitive machinery or process, then we can say something about the reliability of that machinery or process, since we know that, at the very least, all but one in the set of beliefs it produces, must be false.
And in those instances where there is a wide variety of mutually exclusive beliefs that seem to be produced by the same cognitive machinery or process, then one may have good reason to doubt his bare intuition in this manner.
Now we probably wouldn’t be doubting our intuitions in the case where one guy on the planet believes the law of non-contradiction is silly. But we might, in the case where, many millions or billions of people assert the truth of mutually exclusive religious beliefs, based on bare intuition.
With math, you have to show your work. If five people have five different answers to the same math problem, and the best they can do to support their answer is say “I had an experience that I really can’t explain, but I know the answer is X”, then it’s safe to assume they are all wrong. That’s not to say one of them isn’t right, just that’s you can discount all their answers until one of them provided further proof.
drj, people commonly find it difficult to put their deepest intuitions into words (and turn to art, music, poetry, worship etc. to help them).
So isn’t the phrase “mutually exclusive beliefs” misleadingly precise? What about wordless, half-formed, provisional or figurative beliefs?
Aren’t these expressions of subjectivity more typical – at least until they are structured by the terminology of religious or other traditions and institutions? Without such structuring, who is in a position to say what is exclusive of what?
We may be much more alike at the subjective level than our traditional belief-systems have allowed us to see.
This is why modern brain research should lead to a better understanding of spirituality, religious experience, mysticism, conversion and such like. (And that won’t necessarily rule out their evidential value for some theistic conclusion, of course… which may be more inclusive than many traditional theists have assumed.)
Since the strongest arguments for Christianity come from history I don’t regard the objections in this thread very highly.
Logic, reason etc are just words that atheists whore to support their worldview. Belief there is a creator derives logically from the observation that the universe had a beginning to its existence. Attempts to explain the existence of the universe without a first cause usually devolve into an endless stream of question begging. Indeed, is a belief in logic or reason properly basic within a non-theistic worldview?
If all Christians based their arguments on was subjective experience then the cheap seats might have a point. I don’t see that happening in debate though. Subjective experience may be one arm of their argument, but not the whole.
Saying that other religions base their truth claims (if indeed they make truth claims) on the same criteria requires the claimant to actually prove their claim. I’m not sure they know enough about religion, either in the general or in the specific, to back that claim.
Also, from the ancient Jewish view, YHWH was presented as the sole God deserving of worship, not necessarily the only one existent. Showing that another god is supported by similar subjective evidence might in fact be evidence for this lesser other god existing, but not grounds to worship it.
Ryan
First, what is true of math is cannot necessarily be extrapolated to other contexts. Here is an example, suppose I am accused of a crime, several credible witnesses claim to have seen me at the scence, and my finger prints are on the crime scene. However, I was in fact not their, because I was on the day of the crime going for a solitary hike in the Waitakere ranges. In this instance I know that I am innocent because I clearly remember being on a hike. I experienced walking through the Waitakere’s, smelling the air, taking in the scenery and so on and I have the vivid experience of remembering this. Seeing this was a solitary hike no body else has this experience or this memory. Now is it rational for me to believe I did not commit the crime? Does the fact that I cannot explain why my prints are at the scene, or the fact that other people claim to have seen me there mean I don’t know that I went for the walk in question? That seems quite dubious.
Second, I think what you say about Math is not actually true. Basic maxims of mathematics and logic are grasped intuitively, one cannot prove the basic maxims, you rather use them to prove other things. I know some people who can grasp complicated math formulas very quickly, they can see almost immediately how to work a conclusion out and often inutively can do so. Others I know cannot do this without going step by step through a complicated proof. No suppose someone told you that he did not accept some basic mathematical axiom, another however , could see inutively that the axiom was true and also grasp almost immediately an implication for it. Would we claim that the latter person was irrational? I don’t think so.
I suspect that even in math some people have a kind of immediate insight, which I would count as a kind of experience, which others do not. And this enables them to know what others don’t.
Peter D,
I think you may be right that these sorts of intuitive experiences might not be contradictory to one another – in fact, they may all be the same, or nearly the same. But the beliefs that come from them definitely can be contradictory. So perhaps we need to distinguish between the belief, and the experience that produced it. For example:
Person A says that he has a strong conviction that Jesus is the Lord because he experienced the inner witness of the holy spirit.
Person B says that Jesus was a prophet, not Lord, based on the personal revelation of Allah.
Perhaps they had the same sort of subjective experience, and every essential way, it was the same experience. But obviously, the beliefs they produced are mutually exclusive. All other things being equal, in that situation, it seems like both Person A and Person B should have good reason to doubt the truth of the [i]beliefs[/i] they derived from their experience.
Say that the entire population also had the same experience, and it was divided 50/50 on the interpretation. 50% came up with the same interpretation of Person A, and 50% came up with the interpretation of Person B. At best, we could say the intuitive experiences produced true beliefs only 50% of the time. Or, none of them could be correct.
While its a great deal messier in the real world, this is essentially the situation believers are in, who rely on the authoritativeness of their own intuition on many spiritual matters.
But really, who knows? All this talk may be completely non-sensical in light of what science has to say about belief and the brain – AFAIK beliefs actually are no different from emotions biochemically – beliefs ARE emotions, and how all this relates to what we call intuition, I do not know. They all might be different words for the same thing 😛
Jason,
If one works from the assumption that reason and logic could be extremely advantageous for survival and reproduction for some organisms in a natural, godless world, then sure, I don’t see why, if that is true, reason and logic couldn’t be properly basic on atheism (for some organisms).
Its essentially the same sort of thing theists will say…. God values truth, so he’d create his beings such that they intuitively comprehend the truth of Him, like the laws of logic, etc. So if theism is true, then belief in God is properly basic.
They both work. We just have to figure out which is probably true – theism or atheism.
FWIW, I think they both can explain true belief rather easily, but I think atheism has an easier time when it comes to false belief.
Drj Perhaps they had the same sort of subjective experience, and every essential way, it was the same experience. But obviously, the beliefs they produced are mutually exclusive. All other things being equal, in that situation, it seems like both Person A and Person B should have good reason to doubt the truth of the [i]beliefs[/i] they derived from their experience.
Say that the entire population also had the same experience, and it was divided 50/50 on the interpretation. 50% came up with the same interpretation of Person A, and 50% came up with the interpretation of Person B. At best, we could say the intuitive experiences produced true beliefs only 50% of the time. Or, none of them could be correct.
Actually I am doubtful about this line of argument, because it seems to me there are many cases where people inutively know something, that a significant proportion of the population do not.
When I was 13 I went rabbit hunting with a farmer, he could using his eye sight spot a rabbit on a hill miles away. Most of the population do not have eyesight that good, should we conclude his eyesight ( which is a subjective visual experience) is unreliable.
I know of a person with Autism who can inutively get the answer to math problems that most of the population would not. I know another person with Autism whose memory and eye for details is significantly better than majority of the population. Should we conclude that his memory and eyesight are unreliable because most of the population don’t share the same intuitive sense for math, or the visual and memory experiences these people have.
Most westerns inutively believe wife beating is wrong, and that men and women have equal rights. Most cultures do not find these beliefs intuitively obvious. Should we reject moral intuitions like this, because majority of the population do not share them.
Moreover, I am sure that someone who teaches Math or logic, can tell you that people who have studied these subjects for many years and who have practised using logical analysis and mathematical reasoning, often intuitively know and grasp many things that someone with little or no training in the subject will not find intuitively obvious. Yet, majority of the population does not have this kind of training.
The list can be expanded; the fact that some people have a intuitive or experiential awareness that some claim is true, and the majority of the population do not share this, does not provide grounds for thinking that there subjective awareness is true.
In fact I suspect most scientists, take for granted intuitively a whole lot of things which would not be considered obvious to many cultures which have not been exposed to scientific reasoning.
If one works from the assumption that reason and logic could be extremely advantageous for survival and reproduction for some organisms in a natural, godless world, then sure, I don’t see why, if that is true, reason and logic couldn’t be properly basic on atheism (for some organisms).
Actually this line of argument has been addressed repeatedly by those who argue the contrary. The problem is that there are two beliefs have two properties, the property of having certain content, and numerous neuro-physicological properties. If the neuropsychological properties of belief cause adaptive behaviour, then it does not matter what the content is, the behaviour is adaptive my virtue of the nuerophysiology.
To get this conclusion you need to assume that neuro-physiological properties are either caused by true belief content or identical with true content and it’s not clear why this assumption can be just given.
A related problem is that there are some beliefs which are such that they would be extremely advantageous regardless if they were true or false. Moral beliefs are like this, if conduct causes survival, what matters is that the person believes its morally correct and acts in accord with it. If the moral belief were false and the person believed it true the result would be the same. The same is true of many mutually exclusive metaphysical beliefs, one could conceptualise something as a tiger, a dangerous demon, an evil god, a stripped witch, a Berkleyian collection of ideas, a Kantian phenomenal object, and it will still be adaptive.
“Actually this line of argument has been addressed repeatedly by those who argue the contrary. The problem is that there are two beliefs have two properties, the property of having certain content, and numerous neuro-physicological properties. If the neuropsychological properties of belief cause adaptive behaviour, then it does not matter what the content is, the behaviour is adaptive my virtue of the nuerophysiology.”
This line of reasoning depends on the assumption that its likely that the content of beliefs are completely disconnected from adaptiveness. I don’t know about you, but I would find it quite strange if the accuracy of beliefs, did not actually tend to, more than not, track with their utility or adaptiveness.
In any case, one can simply amend the assumption to be a little more precise: “In a universe where the accuracy of the content of beliefs tended to, in many or even some cases, be adaptive, we would expect to see true beliefs (perhaps accurate is a better word).”
I don’t see that as any less reasonable than the leap that the theist asks us to make – that we are made in God’s image, and since God has true beliefs, so can we.
“To get this conclusion you need to assume that neuro-physiological properties are either caused by true belief content or identical with true content and it’s not clear why this assumption can be
just given.”
I don’t know. At the moment, I think beliefs are neurophysiological things, that are caused by other neurophysiological things, and they in turn cause other neurophysiological things, which result in action. While it might be true that false beliefs can move other neurophysiological mechanisms in ways that are similar to true beliefs – but it seems like more accurate beliefs would move those mechanisms in more adaptive ways, more consistently, over a wider range of scenarios.
“The list can be expanded; the fact that some people have a intuitive or experiential awareness that some claim is true, and the majority of the population do not share this, does not provide grounds for thinking that there subjective awareness is true.”
The difference I can see between these scenarios, and say… something like religious belief, is that all these exceptional intuitions (math, extraordinary eyesight) can be empirically verified as accurate or not, through intuitions and senses that the vast majority of us place a much higher degree of trust. We can check the work of the math whiz, or we can use telescopes to check the sight of the rabbit hunting farmer.
In each case, the means to test the accuracy of those intuitions is extremely clear. The hunter can catch more rabbits, the math whiz can mathematically describe and predict more things accurately, and/or faster. In the absence of such easy cross-checking, I think the math whiz, or the rabbit hunter would have powerful reasons to doubt their intuitions.
Yea, we have to use intuitions about the rules of logic and reason to verify these things or to even develop the testing methods, etc, but again – those are essentially requirements for any structured belief to even be articulated.
Thank you for the insightful thoughts. The ability to stay in a place of “I don’t know” is so difficult for people. Until further reason or personal experience tell you otherwise, I believe we should all stay in a place of discernment. I am grateful for you post.
DrJ, I don’t have much time at present, but I’ll offer another quick counter example. Introspective beliefs about our own mental states, such things as the belief I am in pain, or feel a tingling in my knee, or I am feeling a bit of nauesa, or that appears blue to me.
These appear to be beliefs about which I am certain, secondly they are private no one can feel my pain, or experience my nausea, or see how a object appears to me. They can not verify these beliefs by introspection.
I also don’t think you addressed the moral examples I provides such as “its wrong to beat your wife” or “its wrong to keep slaves”.
[…] I'm so Objective about how You're so Subjective | MandM One general objection to theistic arguments for God is that no such argument could be based on the subjective experience of one's own cognitive processes, and. […]