At the close of his 1967 book “God and Other Minds”, Alvin Plantinga argues that if theistic belief is to be dismissed as “irrational”, or in some sense “epistemically sub-par” on the basis that it lacks a rationally compelling argument, then likewise we should also reject belief in other minds, since the best argument for the belief in such minds (the analogical argument) is not rationally compelling[i]. What this implies is that if belief in other minds is justified even in spite of the fact that it lacks a rationally compelling argument, then equally so, belief in God may be justified in spite of such an argument[ii]. To hold then, that belief in God is unjustified in the absence of a compelling theistic proof, would be to hold a double standard[iii].
For obvious reasons, few people would dare to dispute the contention that belief in other minds is rational. However, Plantinga’s critics have two options: (1) they might contend that belief in other minds is rational, but only in virtue of a rationally compelling argument. Hence their burden would be to produce a rationally compulsive version of the analogical argument. (2) They could admit that there is no rationally compulsive version of the analogical argument, but argue that there is a relevant difference between theistic belief and belief in other minds, such that the two beliefs are not epistemically equivalent or, as it were, “equiprobable”.
In this paper, I am not concerned to argue against (1), but suffice to say I think it thoroughly wrong-headed. I am concerned however, to argue against one particular version of (2). Some of Plantinga’s critics have charged that belief in God and belief in other human minds are epistemically unalike in the sense that reasonable people do not disagree about whether or not other minds exist, whereas reasonable clearly disagree about whether or not God exists.
While he doesn’t explicitly respond to Plantinga or any of the so called “Reformed Epistemologists”, Richard Feldman argues something akin to in his article entitled “Reasonable Religious Disagreements”. Hence it makes sense to analyze his argument in the context of an objection against Reformed Epistemology.
I do not find his argument convincing. In-fact, as I will go on to argue, un-sharable private evidence in the form of religious experience proves an intractable problem for Feldman’s argument with respect to religious disagreements. That is not to say that there is no epistemic parity between theistic belief and belief in other minds, rather it is simply to say that at least one attempt to establish any such parity is not successful.
Feldman’s thesis is that reasonable disagreement between epistemic peers who have fully disclosed their evidence is not possible[iv]. That is to say, reasonable disagreement cannot subsist between two parties that are equivalently intelligent, have approximately equal powers of reasoning, are equal with respect to background information and have shared all relevant evidence[v]. When he says that reasonable disagreement cannot subsist between such people, Feldman does not mean to say that both parties should agree. Rather, what he means to say is that both parties should suspend judgement[vi]. In other words, those who are party to the discussion cannot simply “agree to disagree” (at least they can’t do so rationally) . Rather, they must opt for a position that can only be described as “agnostic”. The final preliminary point to clarify is the issue of “reasonability”. By this Feldman means to say is that a belief is “reasonable” just if it has sufficient evidential support. This point is important, because as Feldman points out, if by “reasonability” one simply means that there is no “obvious blunder”, then it’s possible to be “reasonable” and yet base ones beliefs on confusion and misunderstanding etc[vii]. Feldman introduces his thesis by way of the following questions:
In order to help us see his point, Feldman entreats us to consider the following scenarios:
– Suppose two individuals are on their way to an important meeting when they come across a fork in the road. The map they have shows no such fork, and they have no other way of getting any more information about which way to go. But, they must choose if they are to get to the meeting on time. One person chooses to go right and the other chooses to go left. In that situation each is entirely reasonable (pragmatically speaking) in going in the direction they are. But both would be equally justified if they had gone in the other direction. However, in such a scenario, neither is justified in believing that the path they have chosen is the right one[x].
– Suppose that a detective has evidence that incriminates Lefty, and equally strong evidence that incriminates Righty of the same crime. Suppose finally, that the detective has evidence to suggest that either Lefty or Righty is guilty, but not both. In that situation, it seems clear that the detective should suspend judgement until further evidence comes out on either side of the issue. After all, where the evidence one way or the other is completely equivalent, it seems entirely unjustified to think that one is guilty and the other is innocent[xi].
Feldman contends that such situations such as this lend support to what he calls “The Uniqueness Thesis”, namely the contention that a body of evidence supports only one proposition out of a set of competing propositions. In other words, for any body of evidence only one attitude is rationally justifiable[xii].
As it happens, I propose to agree with Feldman with respect to the Uniqueness Thesis. Where the body of evidence is completely indeterminate, it seems utterly unjustified to think that one conclusion is true. As Feldman himself points out, there may be good pragmatic reasons for believing P as opposed to ~P, but pragmatic reasons seem to do little to give any reason for believing that either P or ~P are, in actual fact, true[xiii]. Some might object that it’s never as clear cut as simply plugging in evidence and getting a single hypothesis out. For instance, for any data set in a scientific experiment, any number of theories might be consistent with all of the available evidence. In this sense, the evidence cannot determine the justifiability of any given theory. But this objection rather misses the point. The claim isn’t that the evidence determines the justifiability of any given theory. Rather, the claim is that the evidence determines the justifiability of a given doxastic attitude, including the suspension of judgement. Hence where there evidence is consistent with any number of hypotheses, the doxastic attitude determined by the evidence is the suspension of judgement. Some have charged that this view commits me to deeply skeptical consequences in that reasonable people seem to disagree about a great number of propositions and hypotheses. For instance, there are reasonable moral nihilists and reasonable moral universalists. The fact then that they seem to reasonably disagree seems to commit me (when conjoined with the uniqueness thesis) to moral skepticism. But this is not at all clear. In-fact, it seems that I am only committed to these “skeptical consequences” if my view entails that people ought to suspend judgement the great majority of the time. However, when conjoined with the epistemological egoism that I will defend in what follows, my view entails that the actual number of instances where the parties need to suspend judgement are few and far between. After all, what I argue is just as applicable to the disagreement between moral nihilists and moral universalists as it is in the case of the disagreement between theists and atheists.
However, that Feldman is right with respect to the Uniqueness Thesis in no way entails that he is right with respect to religious disagreements. It is fully compatible with the truth of the Uniqueness Thesis that we shouldn’t suspend judgements when it comes to religious disagreements. Critical to the suspension of judgement on Feldman’s account, is that all relevant evidence has been shared. As I will go on to argue, the conditions Feldman specifies are never, even in principle, met in Religious disagreements of a particular kind. More precisely, in my contention evidence in the form of religious experience cannot be “shared” with other people. When I say that Religious Experience cannot be “shared”, what I mean to say is that it cannot have the same justificatory force for the non believer as it does for the believer. In other words, even though a believer can in a sense “communicate” the fact that he has had a religious experience, the believers testimony would not provide a person who hasn’t had the relevant experience with the same degree of doxastic justification as it does for the believer.
Anticipating this response, Feldman argues that this simply pushes the issue back a step. Once those who are party to a religious disagreement are made aware of the experience of the other, and aware of the evidentiary support that those experiences provide to the believer, the evidence between the two parties is fully disclosed[xiv] and the disagreement must ultimately end in a suspension of judgement. In order to help us see this point, Feldman appeals to the following role of evidence: If S, has evidence that some other person S1 has evidence for P, then, S has evidence for P.[xv] However, in order for this objection to get off the ground, it seems that we need to interpret Feldman as saying that the evidence that S has for P has justificatory force as it does for S1. After all, if the evidence for P has more justificatory force for S than it does for S1, then it would still seem to follow that, in at least some circumstances, reasonable disagreement between S and S1 could subsist. As I will go on to argue, Feldman’s premise in this respect is not convincing. However, at this stage we need to be precise about the terms of my argument. I am not denying the contention that S has evidence for P when S has evidence that S1 has evidence for P. Rather, what I am arguing is that in such a situation, S does not have the same degree of justification as S1.
In order to see what I’m getting at here, consider the following scenario (taken from what Feldman has argued elsewhere):
“Bob and Ray are sitting in an air-conditioned hotel lobby reading yesterday’s newspaper. Each has reads that it will be very warm today and, on that basis, each believes that it is very warm today. Then Bob goes outside and feels the heat. They both continue to believe that it is very warm today. But at this point Bob’s belief is better justified[xvi]
Following this, Conee and Feldman comment that Bob’s justification increased because he actually experienced the heat. He thereby underwent a mental change which internalized the temperature.[xvii] Now while Conee and Feldman used in the context of arguing for internalism, it can similarly be used in the context of defending the private evidence defence to Feldman’s argument from disagreement. In order to see this, suppose that Bob and Ray strike up a conversation while the latter is still inside the air-conditioned lobby. “It’s really hot out here!” Bob proclaims “you should come out and see!” At this point, Ray has two sources of justification for the belief that’s its warm: 1) it was in the Newspaper and 2) Bob just told him. But it still seems possible for Ray to have a third source justification. Pursuing with our thought experiment a bit further, let’s suppose that Ray joins Bob outside. “Whew” Ray exclaims, “it really is hot out here!” in such a situation, intuitively speaking, we seem to want to say that Ray’s justification is now even better than it was before he joined Bob. Nevertheless, we still want to say that Ray’s justification for believing that it’s warm is now identical to Bob’s. But if Ray’s justification for believing that its warm is improved by his joining Bob, then it would seem to be the case that Bob’s purported experience does not provide Ray with the same degree of justification as the experience itself provides for Bob. In other words, Bob’s direct experience of the heat cannot be conveyed, with the same degree of evidential force, to Ray. Such a principle of reasoning does seem to enjoy further intuitive support. Suppose for instance that a bible scholar tells an African tribesman who has never read (or even heard about) the bible before, about the story of Daniel and the Lions. In that instance, the bible scholar’s testimonial evidence is sufficient to justify the tribesman’s belief that the story of Daniel and the Lions is in the bible. However, the bible scholar is more justified than the tribesman by virtue of the fact that he has actually read the book of Daniel. But suppose that the tribesman picks up the bible and reads the book of Daniel. We would now say that the tribesman is just as justified as the bible scholar in believing that it contains the story of Daniel and the Lions.
Examples such as this seem to support the conclusion that our own experiences carry greater evidential significance in our own considerations, than the purported experiences of others. After all, it was only once Ray had an experience that was identical to Bob’s that the two were regarded as having the same degree of justification. Bob may have been able to communicate his experience to Ray, but clearly that testimonial evidence did not convey the degree of justification as the experience itself did for Ray. This soft brand of epistemological egoism has an important consequence for our discussion of disagreement. That is, a theist who bases his faith on some kind of “religious experience” is justified in regarding his own experience as counting for more than the purported evidence of another individual with an “atheistic experience”[1]. However, the theist must acknowledge that genuine disagreement does provide at least a partial defeater. Although it’s the case that direct experience has more evidentiary force for the subject of that experience, the testimony of a juxtaposing experience is still counter-evidence. As such, it must ultimately undercut the certainty with which an individual can hold his experientially justified beliefs. For instance, suppose that “Theist” is asked to rank the certainty of her beliefs on a scale of 0 to 10 where 10 designates that P is absolutely certain, and “0” designates that ~P is absolutely certain. Suppose furthermore, that (prior to full disclosure) on the basis of her religious experience, “Theist” ranks her certainty at 9.5[2]. But then consider the juxtaposing scenario where another individual “Atheist”, has an atheistic experience on which he bases his certainty that God does not exist at 9.5. Suppose finally that “Theist” and “Atheist” engage in an argument in which they both share their respective experiences with one-another. In that situation, both “Theist” and “Atheist” are furnished with counter-evidence for their respective beliefs. Thus if “Theist” and “Atheist” are to properly apportion their beliefs to the available evidence, they should respectively reduce their degree of certainty. Thus neither “Theist” nor “Atheist” can hold to their respective beliefs with the same degree of certainty as they did. However, it needs to be emphasized that the justificatory force of direct experience is far greater for the subject of that experience. Hence although “Atheist’s” testimonial evidence has provided a partial evidentiary defeater for “Theist’s” beliefs, it has not defeated “Theist’s” belief outright. That is to say, although it reduces their respective certainty down from 9.5, it does not reduce it to 5.
However, if Feldman is to make his case with respect to Religious Disagreements, it needs to be the case that genuine disagreement provides a total evidentiary defeater. That is to say, if on the basis of genuine disagreement both “Theist” and “Atheist” are to suspend judgement about theism, then it needs to be the case that genuine disagreement brings their respective levels of certainty back to 5. Only then would it strip both parties of sufficient justification for making a judgement either way. However, as I have argued, individuals have reason for weighing their own experiences as having more evidentiary force than the apparent experiences of other individuals. Returning then to our example, while we can concede that after full disclosure, neither “Theist” nor “Atheist” can be as justifiably certain in holding to their respective beliefs, it may nevertheless be the case that they are still sufficiently justified in retaining those beliefs. Pursuing with our though experiment, let’s suppose that having both shared all their evidence with one-another (including their experiences), they then go away and re-calculate their certainty levels. If they are to apportion their beliefs to the evidence, then both “Theist” and “Atheist” must respectively consider that the testimony of the other is in-fact counter-evidence to their own beliefs. Hence they must correspondingly reduce their levels of certainty. However, because “Theist” may well regard her own experiences as having greater evidentiary significance (in her own considerations) than the apparent experiences of “Atheist”, her respective levels of certainty would not (justifiably) drop back to 5 as Feldman would require. The same can be said for “Atheist”.
The inability of “Theist” and “Atheist” to convey the justificatory force of their experiences implies that not all evidence is public. Ergo, some evidence is private. It therefore seems that, at least in the case of certain kinds of religious disagreements, the “full disclosure” of all relevant evidence is not, even in principle, possible. It therefore follows that both “Theist” and “Atheist” can justifiably believe that the other side is wrong, and at the same time admit that they are also justified. So much for Feldman’s argument from disagreement.
Notes:
[1] I don’t know what would count as an “atheistic experience” but whether there are such things and what their form might be is largely beside the point. Even were it the case that there were no such thing as a “genuine atheistic experiences”, the point could be easily re-cast in terms of alternate theistic religious experiences.
[2] Absolute epistemic certainty isn’t a genuine possibility. The formal possibility that religious experiences are an accidental by-product of evolution, do count as counter-evidence however improbable that may be.
[3] I will post a more in depth series of articles on the epistemic importance of disagreement in the near future. In these forthcoming articles I will re-orient the argument slightly to focus more on the epistemic impact that the plurality of religious beliefs has on Christian Particularism.
References:
[i] Sennett, James F. “The Analytic Theist: an Alvin Plantinga Reader”. Grand Rapids Michigan. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 1998. Chapter: “Reformed Epistemology”. pp 97. Lines. 1-9
[ii] Sennett, James F. “The Analytic Theist: an Alvin Plantinga Reader”. Grand Rapids Michigan. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 1998. Chapter: “Reformed Epistemology”. pp 97. Lines. 8-9
[iii] Sennett, James F. “The Analytic Theist: an Alvin Plantinga Reader”. Grand Rapids Michigan. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 1998. Chapter: “Reformed Epistemology”. pp 97. Lines. 9-11
[iv] Feldman, Richard. “Reasonable Religious Disagreements”. In “Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life”. Edited by Louise M Antony. New York. Oxford University Press. 2007. Chapter: 16. pp. 202 lines 12-15
[v] Feldman, Richard. “Reasonable Religious Disagreements”. In “Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life”. Edited by Louise M Antony. New York. Oxford University Press. 2007. Chapter: 16. pp. 202 lines 12-15
[vi] Feldman, Richard. “Reasonable Religious Disagreements”. In “Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life”. Edited by Louise M Antony. New York. Oxford University Press. 2007. Chapter: 16. pp. 205 lines 9-10
[vii] Feldman, Richard. “Reasonable Religious Disagreements”. In “Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life”. Edited by Louise M Antony. New York. Oxford University Press. 2007. Chapter: 16. pp. 202/203 lines. 29-39/1-3
[viii] Feldman, Richard. “Reasonable Religious Disagreements”. In “Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life”. Edited by Louise M Antony. New York. Oxford University Press. 2007. Chapter: 16. pp. 201 lines. 19-20
[ix] Feldman, Richard. “Reasonable Religious Disagreements”. In “Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life”. Edited by Louise M Antony. New York. Oxford University Press. 2007. Chapter: 16. pp. 201 lines. 20-22
[x] Feldman, Richard. “Reasonable Religious Disagreements”. In “Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life”. Edited by Louise M Antony. New York. Oxford University Press. 2007. Chapter: 16. pp. 203 lines. 28-37
[xi] Feldman, Richard. “Reasonable Religious Disagreements”. In “Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life”. Edited by Louise M Antony. New York. Oxford University Press. 2007. Chapter: 16. pp. 204/205 lines. 22-34/1-10
[xii] Feldman, Richard. “Reasonable Religious Disagreements”. In “Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life”. Edited by Louise M Antony. New York. Oxford University Press. 2007. Chapter: 16. pp. 205 lines. 10-17
[xiii] Feldman, Richard. “Reasonable Religious Disagreements”. In “Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life”. Edited by Louise M Antony. New York. Oxford University Press. 2007. Chapter: 16. pp.203 lines. 14-17
[xiv] Feldman, Richard. “Reasonable Religious Disagreements”. In “Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life”. Edited by Louise M Antony. New York. Oxford University Press. 2007. Chapter: 16. pp.208 lines. 11-18
[xv] Feldman, Richard. “Reasonable Religious Disagreements”. In “Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life”. Edited by Louise M Antony. New York. Oxford University Press. 2007. Chapter: 16. pp.208 lines. 16-18
[xvi] Feldman, Richard and Conee, Earl. “Internalism Defended”. American Philosophical Quarterly. Vol 38. No 1 (January 2001) pp 1-18. pp 3. Chapter “A Defense of Internalism” lines. 12-20
[xvii] Feldman, Richard and Conee, Earl. “Internalism Defended”. American Philosophical Quarterly. Vol 38. No 1 (January 2001) pp 1-18. pp 3. Chapter “A Defense of Internalism” lines. 21-25
Tags: Alvin Plantinga · Analogical argument · Disagreement · God and Other Minds · Rationality · Reformed Epistemology · Religious Epistemology · Richard Feldman · Theism · Theists39 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.
So many issues are raised here it is hard to know where to start.
First, let’s keep in mind that to call anything a “religious” experience is already to call up a range of meanings, implications, expectations that are not given along with the subjective experience itself.
“Bare” experiences (whatever that means) are no more religiously evidential in themselves than bare noises are linguistically informative.
So a safer term to use is “religiously interpreted experiences” or happenings, feelings, emotions etc. “taken religiously”.
Now while I agree that our own experiences may sometimes have more evidential force for us than the experiences of others, this by itself gives us no infallible inner route to truth.
As Wittgenstein’s discussion of so-called private languages makes clear, we have to learn to treat our inner experiences as one thing or another, and learning requires public contexts, life and action, trial and error.
This is not to say the subjective experiences or inner lives of people can’t support their theistic or other religious conclusions – just that we all need contexts of living, behaving, interacting in which to develop criteria for what is and what is not reasonable to count as “evidence” in any public sense. And that, it seems to me, is an on-going debate – there are no short cuts.
So I look forward to the further posts on the epistemic importance of disagreement, in a public domain, about our “private” experiences.
Just like to say the best philosophy I’ve seen so far on this blog was in this post
” “Bare” experiences (whatever that means) are no more religiously evidential in themselves than bare noises are linguistically informative.”
funny – i agree, in regards to certain experiences people describe as ‘feelings’
how about ‘super-natural’ ?
Would you agree that some bare experiences could show evidence of the super-natural?
Andrew,
It seems to me Feildman’s position may face self referential problems. Don’t reasonable highly intelligent people disagree about all sorts of epistemological claims, and in particular don’t they disagree over his epistemic claims? Wouldn’t this mean we should be agnostic about epistemological claims like the ones he makes.
Second, I think there is a counter example here from morality.
Take the claim C: Its wrong to torture babies purely for fun.
This is a claim about which I am fairly certain. There are few things I believe more strongly. I find it as evident as the claim that nothing can be both green all over and blue all over at the same time.
But, there are intelligent reasonable people who disagree with me.
There are people like Mackie who argue that moral claims are all false. There are non cognitivists who deny it has truth value. There are moral skeptics who argue beliefs like this are illusions of evolution and so on. Moreover, even if people have common moral intuitions about the truth of claims like C, there is widespread meta ethical disagreement over what is the nature of “wrongness” is. So, wouldn’t Feildman’s argument entail one should be agnostic about claims such as C.
Now in typical discussions of God and Morality, people suggest that if a theory entails that the we should deny claims like C that is a pretty decisive problem for the theory. The most common criticism of a divine command theory is the argument that it entails that C could be untrue so why would this implication not be a problem for epistemic positions like Fieldman’s?
Peter,
A “religious experience” is simply any seeming (as in a phenomenological experience with propositional content) that is in some sense “religiously oriented”. For instance, as a theist I have the regular seeming that God exists. The seeming seems to “assure” me of the truth of the proposition that God exists.
Defined as such, it circumvents your objection (re the lack of evidential support provided by noises). After all, a “bare noise” completely lacks propositional content in any sense.
I never said anything about religious experiences providing “infallible” justification. All I have indicated is that it gives us prima facie justification. “Infallible” justification would be justification that is, in principle, indefeasible. But given my concession that alternate experiences do provide counter-evidence, I am not committed to religious experience being infallible.
Rosjier,
Thank you for those kind remarks
Matt,
Your concerns are, i think, well placed. Feldman’s thesis does face self defeat and does imply that we ought to be moral skeptics. But it only does so when taken in exclusion. When it is conjoined with epistemological egoism, we can quite successfully agree with Feldman and yet still quite justifiably hold to our moral beliefs. The conjunction of Feldman’s thesis with epistemological egoism also solves the problem of self defeat. Suppose S believes Feldman’s thesis on the basis of an intuition. When conjoined with epistemological egoism, S is epistemically justified in regarding that intuition as counting for more than the purported intuitions of others. Hence S may still hold to Feldman’s thesis even in spite of the fact that people disagree.
But generally yes, if Feldman’s thesis is taken in exclusion it does face self defeat and it does imply moral skepticism.
Now some might argue that if epistemological egoism is incompatible with Feldman’s thesis. But it’s not clear that this is so. In some instances, ones intuitive experiences carry no evidential weight while in other situations it does. For instance, it’s thought that if a Good God exists then he would want to make Himself known to us through an inner experience (ala the sensus divinitatis). Religious experiences then, provide some evidential support to the hypothesis that God exists. In that instance, its entirely appropriate to use “intuitive” evidence in support for a hypothesis because it’s precisely what we’d expect. By contrast, there are situations were evidence based on intuition is completely inappropriate because its’ not what we expect given the hypothesis.
Andrew,
You are right, “infallible” was too strong. Yet many believers do want to say they know, and even are certain – not just that they “seem to know”.
I’m not wanting to deny them propositional content, but simply suggest that it comes from more than just their own private experience. It presupposed a context of discourse in a community or tradition of faith, conceptualised and expressed in certain ways. Purely on its own, it might not be any more “religiously oriented” than any other experience.
We have to learn the discourse of a faith, however imperfectly, to be able to interpret certain experiences as prima facie evidential for that faith. (I’m not suggesting you are disputing this but perhaps it is worth spelling it out, in case you are and I need to think more about it.)
Peter,
You’re certainly right that a lot of religious folk DO want to say that they’re certain about their faith. In-fact as a Christian myself I WANT to be able to say that i’m 100% certain about it, but frankly i’m not sure how I can. Hence one of my notes reads that absolute certainty is not a genuine possibility.
In point of fact though. Religious experiences tend to assure the subjects of those experiences of specific theological truths. For instance, my religious experience doesn’t simply “assure” me that God exists (although that is self evidently entailed by my experience), rather it “assures” me of the fact that Christ died for my sins. Hence such experiences are, for want of a better word, very “religion specific”.
The evidential force of religious experience really comes from their phenomenological nature. It’s typically characterized by an irresistibly strong sense that some theological proposition is true. Much in the same way that the evidential force of moral intuitions lies in their phenomenological nature.
Rosjier,
Regarding bare or uninterpreted experiences being evidence of the supernatural, I would doubt this in any strong sense, not because they can’t happen but because at the time they happen they are not conceptualised in supernaturalistic or religious terms.
Pre-linguistic children, religiously untutored adults, mentally disabled or confused people may well have experiences which other theists would call “grace”, “worshipful awe”, a “sense of presence” and the like. And perhaps retrospectively, if able to use the relevant language and concepts, such people may claim them as evidential for their faith – though they are no longer the experiences they were, but rather memories of those experiences.
At best, remembered religious experiences I suggest may form part of a cumulative evidential case, in the context of a life itself lived personally and socially under that particular interpretation.
As i’v said, religious experiences typically come in the form of a direct seeming that some theological proposition is true.
For instance, my religious experience says to me that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins.
Now there seems very little reason to think that religiously untutored adults, the mentally handicapped et al are incapable of having experiences that are qualitatively identical to mine.
Whether or not these experiences are “remembered” or not is utterly irrelevant. If I go through an extended phase wherein I don’t have an experience God’s grace, I still have memorial seemings of the religious experiences I’v had, and that provides me with the same non-inferential justification that my present religious experiences do.
Finally, these seemings provide direct, non-inferential justification for the beliefs they create. Hence it’s not that they form part of a “cumulative evidential case”, rather it’s that they directly justify the beliefs they create. After all, if I have a religious experience, it’s not that I use it in a premise in some fancy argument. Rather, it directly justifies my belief that Jesus was sacrificed for my sins even before I’v had the chance to run through any such argument. Much the same is true when we see people we know well. For instance, when I come home and my brother is watching TV, the belief I form is non-inferentially justified insofar as I didn’t need to run through an argument in order to be justified in believing that my brother is watching TV. Rather, I have a direct experience that my brother is watching TV.
In any event, most of this is incidental. This paper is concerned with the epistemic value of disagreements, not the evidential value of religious experience. Certainly it does pre-suppose a thesis which says that religious experiences do have evidential value. But that is merely for the purpose of responding to Richard Feldman. Perhaps at some stage I will write an article defending the thesis that religious experiences have evidential value.
Perhaps I ought have been more clear in my previous statement. Religious Experiences typically come in the form of seemings which assure its subjects of the truth of some SPECIFIC theological proposition. Rarely ever is it some vague, unspecific sensation.
[…] HT: MandM […]
Andrew, our discussion itself may provide an interesting test case for your thesis.
It seems to you, with Evangelical convictions, that religious experiences carry precise doctrinal content and so in themselves provide strong evidential force for the experiencer.
It seems to me, with Quaker convictions, that while the experiences are spiritually enriching, their doctrinal significance comes largely from an interpretative context and their evidential force is dispersed throughout a whole way of life.
Are we in significant disagreement, to the extent that we both ought to suspend judgement, as Feldman’s argument seems to require?
Or can we tolerate our differences, because it is a large topic about which sincere people hold a variety of views, and indeed may change their views over time?
“At best, remembered religious experiences I suggest may form part of a cumulative evidential case, in the context of a life itself lived personally and socially under that particular interpretation.”
I agree with this!
As one with Catholic convictions, I would say that certainty of Faith is possible but not necessarily caused by (or does not require) a ‘religious experience.’
As an example Blessed Mother Theresa of Calcutta did not ‘feel the grace of God’ between starting her order and her death. Rather she ‘felt’ the opposite – that God was withdrawing from her.
God Bless!
@Peter,
On the one hand it’s not clear to me that we genuinely are disagreeing. It’s not clear that you disagree with me since you haven’t really made your position explicit.
But insofar as you are not a Christian while I am, and insofar as we are discussing the rational justifiability of my faith, then I suppose that yes we are disagreeing.
Now in this article, I have defended the contention that I am justified in regarding my own experience as having more evidential significance in my own considerations than the purported experience of others.
Turning to your example of Quakers with alternate experiences. If the Quaker bases his faith on an experience in much same way that I base my on an experience. Then (if what I have argued in this article is correct) in my contention, the Quaker is justified in regarding his own experience as evidentially more significant than my purported religious experience. But it also applies in reverse. That is, I am justified in regarding my own religious experience as evidentially more significant than the purported experience of the Quaker.
Hence even in spite of this disagreement, it follows that I am justified in continuing to hold to my theological convictions a is the Quaker.
Rosjier,
I’m not clear about the nature of Mother Theresa’s spiritual life. But whether or not it’s the case that there are instances of those with religious beliefs that are not caused by a religious experience is rather beside the point. That is, it seems completely possible for there to be some who base their faith on something other than a religious experience.
But that does very little to actually undermine the evidential significance that religious experiences have on those who do have them.
Andrew
Thanks for the discussion so far. I look forward to your further posts on this fascinating topic.
You’ve certainly encouraged me to brush up on Swinburne’s Principle of Credulity – though it seems to me you go a good deal further than he does, in allowing religious experiences to be not just prima facie perceptions of spiritual realities, but to carry on their face quite specific doctrinal content.
I’ll be interested to see how you deal with perceived experiences by others of doctrines you regard as false, and with fictional and fantastic experiences which seem prima facie compelling for those who have them.
Peter,
Well that’s really quite simple really. If what I argue here is accurate, then the following is the case: If S has a religious experience R, and S* has a religious experience R* which is completely different from S’, then S is epistemically justified in regarding her own experience as having greater justificatory force in her own considerations than the purported experience of S*.
In other words, when S is calculating the justifiability of her religious beliefs, she is permitted to regard her own experience as having more justificatory force than the apparent experience that S* had.
Similarly, something parallel applies for S*.
hi, I’m sorry if my question takes the flow of the comments off track, but I wanted to ask it. If S believes ~P on the basis of no experience of God (since the examples used are atheist and theist, and per your first footnote), but S1 comes along and provides the claim of an experience of P, then it seems that in order for S to continue on believing ~P then they have to also believe something about religious experiences. I understand your line of argument was to demonstrate that in some situations, evidence is arrived at in such a way that it is impossible to share, but it seems to me that it would already fail in quite a few (though not all) disagreements over the existence of things. Since those things are objects of some sort, saying that they don’t exist seems to me to involve completely different sorts of justification than saying that they do, or it is different in such a way that the theist experience would have to trump the atheist experience, even only as it is conveyed (all things being equal, and we’re thinking of the atheist experience as an experience of a thing not being or appearing in a certain way that it is expected to – and perhaps Swinburne’s ‘principle of credulity’). I hope I’m making sense. You raised plenty of other problems with Feldman’s argument, so my question has more to do with clarifying, for myself, how the claims involved in P/~P, even though they are about the same thing, are epistemically quite different (I think you already touched on it quickly with Felman’s “hot day” example). It seems that this would be another way that Feldman’s train of thought fails to leave the station.
matt,
Just a question of clarification.
Are you saying that since God is an “entity” that experience can’t count as justification for the reasonability of theistic belief?
I’ll ask you to clarify your question, it wasn’t entirely clear.
matt,
No offense intended, but I struggled to decipher what it is that you are asking.
Andrew, I think the other Matt is raising this issue.
How can you know the non existence of something by experience?
One can know that X exists by experiencing it,
and if one does not experience X then one cannot know X exists by experience and so one needs other reasons.
But the claim, I have experienced the non existence of X, sounds kinda weird.
I am inclined to think that,if one understands experience broadly to include logical and moral intiutions one might be able to get around this weirdness. One could say I can “see” for example that square triangles don’t exist, neither do married batechlors or objects that are blue all over and black all over, but that’s because I can “see” directly that these are impossible.
I don’t think that’s typically what atheists however claim.
I am sorry, my question was indeed a bit messy. The Matt’s response was more or less what I was looking for. I think I still have a question that isn’t quite addressed completely, so I’ll try to tighten it up.
The only way I could see Feldman’s whole idea working out, is if one took religious beliefs to be something like political opinions. My question has to do with the disagreement between the atheist and the theist being over the existence of a thing. If Bob believes ~X but finds themselves discussing X with a person, Frank, who claims to have experienced X, and by all accounts Frank is level-headed, has nothing wrong with their brains, is known to be an honest fellow etc. it seems to me, intuitively I guess, that Bob would have to move toward belief in P while Frank would not have to be moved at all by Bob’s disbelief in P. This is because P, in the case of God, is an object. On the theistic account, God would be present at times to the believer. Bob, in this sort of disagreement would have his work cut out for him if he wanted to reasonably remain stationary on the scale of belief. Matt mentioned married bachelors, and I suppose Bob could argue that God was a contradiction as well. Still, it doesn’t seem that should move Frank since God has been present to him.
I’m sorry if that all was messy too. I’m an artist by trade, and a philosopher by hobby. I really enjoy coming by blogs like this, and I thought your article was brilliant stuff, Andrew, so my question doesn’t have any critical intent to it. It is a question of whether or not Feldman might also fail to take into account the fact that epistemic duties can vary from disagreement to disagreement, and more specifically, how we should think of disagreements about God.
and thank you, Matt.
@matt, Matt and Andrew
There’s an interesting distinction showing up here between perceptual approaches to religious experiences (such as Swinburne follows), and propositional approaches, such as Andrew adopts.
With perceptual “seemings” there’s not much scope for atheists to claim “seeming not to perceive God’s existence” as evidential – at least until they show they have done all the relevant searches and have properly-working perceptual abilities, etc. (and how can they or anyone else decide that?) Trying to perceive the non-existence of something is notoriously problematic.
However, with propositional religious intuitions there is more scope for atheists to make a relevant claim.
“It came to me with absolute certainty that God does not exist” is the sort of statement we often find in atheist “conversion stories” and is obviously worth taking serious philosophical notice of.
The most interesting difference between the perceptual and the propositional approaches is that propositions are much more open to debate and evaluation by others than perceptions are. That’s the price you pay for using a public language.
So once intuitions are put into words, the debate again become a public domain one, and the seeming prima facie weight of private religious experience become much more questionable.
For instance, a claim like “I have a strong intuition that Joseph was the mother of Jesus” is hardly likely to be granted prima facie evidential status by any philosopher of religion, however generous they may be with their principle of credulity.
I’d hope NOBODY would take strong intuitions about men being mothers seriously. I’m not sold either on the notion that an account of an experience, or even an anecdote can’t count as evidence for something. I think such restrictions would make historians’ workload much lighter. Perhaps that is a bad analogy though.
@matt
Yes you are right, verbally non-sensical intuitions are not to be taken seriously. But it is a public (and therefore rationally debatable) matter what makes verbal sense and what does not.
Similarly with verbal accounts and anecdotes about experiences. They may well count as evidence – I don’t rule that out at all. My point is just that whether they do or not depends not just on the certainty of the private intuitions but on some degree of public intelligibility and credibility.
Perceptual seemings, on their own, may well have prima facie evidential weight for those who have. But propositional seemings (just because they are propositions) involve a higher level of public accountability before they can carry evidential weight.
Or so it seems to me!
I’m still not buying it. I’ll lean on the history analogy a little harder. We seem to trust many accounts written by people of the past who had experiences that we can’t possibly have ourselves. Of course we want to be sure that these accounts corroborate with other things. In the case of a debate over the existence of God, it would be assumed that both parties had access to the same information as well, so the religious experience doesn’t come out of nowhere. It would be added to this body of information. It should also be understood that I am not talking/asking about an experience with a doctrine, since it is hard for me to see how a person could experience something like that directly. The experience of God would be the experience of a supernatural person. It is hard to see how, all things being equal, a healthy and alert individual’s experience of the divine person is not a bit of evidence, except for a prima facie rejection of the existence of such a person without any analogous experiential basis. I should probably wait for Andrew to chime in again, though, I’m getting away from myself.
@Matt Flannagan,
You’re probably right regarding the supposed weirdness of saying that you cannot, as it were, “intuit” the absence of something. But that’s rather incidental to the argument. As the other Matt pointed out, my first footnote concedes this point. But the point I make in this article can easily be re-cast in terms of alternate religious experiences such as the disagreement between Christians and Muslims and their varying religious experiences.
@ Both Matt’s,
Nevertheless, I am inclined to think that there might be such a thing as an “a-theistic experience” insofar as it seems at least possible to think that “atheist” might have a seeming with the propositional content “God does not exist” and a relatively strong phenomenological character. I believe that Michael Martin argues something akin to this when arguing against Swinburne’s principle of credulity, though i might be wrong about that.
@Peter,
Like I said, I think you’re probably right when it comes to intuiting the non-existence of something. As I say though, that’s incidental to the point i’m trying to make. Additionally, for the sake of the argument I think it fair to be charitable to the atheist and at least permit him the possibility of his seemings providing some kind of evidentiary support. Now there may be some intractable issues on whether or not doing so is possible, but I think that we could leave that issue for a different argument.
Regarding your point about seemings as to who the father of Jesus was. I can grant that in certain circumstances, seemings are quite inappropriate as a source of evidence. Part of the reason that seemings are appropriate as a source of evidence for the existence of God is that presumably a good God would want us to know Him personally and so reveal Himself to us in some way such as to bring us into that relationship. It’s entirely predictable then, that given the truth of some kind of theism, we would have religious seemings. The reality of such religious experiences then gives prima facie support to theism.
But similarly, it seems relatively clear that in some circumstances the theory under question does not similarly predict that there should be seemings in its favor. Hence the reality of those seemings does very little to offer evidence in its favor.
I believe that this somewhat answers Matt’s concern regarding his history analogy. After all, history seems like one of those things where, as it were, seemings are not anticipated and so not to be taken seriously.
Basically what it boils down to saying is that different theories predict different kinds of evidence.
Thanks Andrew, that was what I was trying to get with the history analogy. In the case of historical records we are prevented by the nature of time from sharing the experience of the persons that wrote those records, but we trust them for many reasons (one of those being the impracticality of always assuming everyone but yourself is an extremely clever liar). I still don’t know about the possibility of an atheists experience given the number of people with some experience of a divine presence/will and given that such experiences are what we would expect to find if there is a God. I think it’s overreaching to expect that all such experiences, subjective as they are, would be properly interpreted by each person as well. I’m a Christian myself, but I think it hardly surprising that people should, by and large, construe experiences with a divine being in entirely wrong ways (I have tended to be a quiet person myself, one of the most common things I would hear people say about me in my undergrad days was, “I thought you were a cocky jerk, but then I realized you were just quiet.” Clearly many people could experience my presence and be very mistaken about me, and form an entire Matt-ology that was wrong on the basis of a real experience of my person). I’d think that, since such experiences are what we should expect given that God exists, the atheist, given the existence of such experiences (not systematic theologies) needs to demonstrate that God is impossible to experience since He cannot exist for some reason or another.
Hebrews 11:6 NASB
“And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.”
The discussion so far has been perhaps philosophical and experiential, so how about a small theological comment.
God has said via the writer of Hebrews that if you dont want to find Him then He wont be available to find. The atheist doesnt just not experience God but he can not experience God.
Jeremiah 29:13 NASB
“You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart”
Same thing, if you dont genuinely want to find God, he wont be available to be found.
Matt,
Notice that my argument regarding the evidential force holds on the in the absence of defeaters.
If someone were to form some kind of “Matt-ology” on the basis of an experience, they are forming a theology with particular propositional content. If the propositional content explicitly refers to yourself and yet it is completely counter-evidential, then those “Matteists” would have a defeater for their theology.
Now what’s important to note is the term “counter-evidential”. That is, the available evidence actually implies that the belief is false. This does not mean that the evidence is absent, it only means that the evidence determines one thing to be true, while the “Matteist” theology goes directly against that evidence.
So the analogy doesn’t quite hold.
As to your comment regarding the plurality of religious experience. That’s what the article is designed to combat. I’m not arguing that Christianity is true, i’m just argued that i’m justified in believing that it’s true. The two are quite different.
I think we might be talking past each other a little bit, but I will gladly accept responsibility for that. My original question doesn’t concern the strength of your argument (as I agree with what you wrote), it would be something in addition to it. Something that might tip the scales in further favor of the theist position. Of course, this would be another argument of its own, as well.
I’ll try to reduce it down. Going back to S and S1. These two are disagreeing, to P or not to P, and it is all very philosophical. They are giving arguments back and forth, and both, as the article says, intellectual equals. It seems that S1, who believes P, has a bit more on S, if S1 has experienced P (P is an object that can be experienced). It seems that this is evidence that S needs to take into consideration. On the scale of belief, where 1 is ~P and 10 is P, it seems as though S1 can stay closer to 10, while S will need to move a little closer to 10 himself.
As for the plurality of religions, I meant only to say that I’ve always thought it was a terribly strange objection. That is what my ‘matt-ology’ story was aimed at. If, say, the vast majority of people in the world had met me at one time or another, but they all disagreed as to my name, height, temperament and so on, such disagreements wouldn’t count much against my existence. That so many people disagreed about a particular thing, which refers to itself as “matt” would only seem to add to the evidential weight in favor of this thing’s existing.
But, I do agree with you, that at the very least reasonable disagreement is still justified because of the inability to communicate the ‘force’ of an experience. The difficulty I am having is in seeing how no experience of a thing can have as much force, and I further doubt that a rational person’s testimony would not carry more weight than another’s lack of testimony. If the one lacking experience is rational, they needn’t adopt belief after hearing the testimony, but, rationally speaking, they should probably have the strength of their belief affected (even if they don’t ‘like’ it).
also, Matt, it seems as though square triangles and married bachelors are rather easy to intuit the non-existence of. One of the things I’m trying to establish, in my own brains, is whether or not that’s the sort of thing the atheist has to establish about God before they can claim an intuition of his non-existence. Since it’s not similarly obvious in the case of God, it seems that it couldn’t be an intuition, or an experience of any sort. I know Bertrand Russell said something like ‘nobody who’s ever sat at the bed of a dying child can believe in God,” and Quentin Smith has some argument that atheism could be formed basically in the presence of some great evil. Still, neither of these claims have held much water, to my knowledge. Is this more or less what you were saying?
Oh I see, right I see where you’re coming from now.
For instance, a claim like “I have a strong intuition that Joseph was the mother of Jesus” is hardly likely to be granted prima facie evidential status by any philosopher of religion, however generous they may be with their principle of credulity.
I think that is because the principle is usually understood as granting prima facie force to an “inutive” seeming. If it seems strongly to P that X, then in the absence of defeaters he is (internally) rational in accepting X. The seeming whereby a man was a mother would seem to be one we have strong reasons against and hence a defeater for.
hey matt, thank you for writing this, it’s a fantastic piece. haven’t read all the responses yet, but the article rocks.
re your introduction: if i remember right in the first few chapters of the problems of philosophy, bertrand russell argues that there are no rational reasons to believe in the existence of anything other than our own mind, including other minds. doesn’t add anything to your discussion, just thought i’d mention it.
shit, sorry andrew, just realised you wrote it. thank you, it’s great.
what if there are two news papers, one says it is hot outside, and one says it is cold. i have no personal experience of the weather outside, and no way to differentiate between the accuracy of the two conflicting newspapers. am i best to suspend my belief of either condition until i have a personal experience of my own?
you give the example of an athiest and a theist, each providing partial defeaters of the others. i would like to introduce a third person, a ‘piggy-in-the-middle’, who has had no experiences of their own, and is trying to choose between the two conflicting positions. should this person disregard both and remain agnostic until such time as they do have a personal experience to base their beliefs on?
i am asking because i am interested what practical application this discussion could have when translated into the real world, in which their are a multitude of conflicting accounts of first-hand experiences. i was staying with a well educated extremely intelligent retired chinese businessman in indonesia last year, and he had many stories of strange things which he genuinely believed he had experienced. for example he told me of the time he ate a tiny piece of tiger meat, maybe the size of a fingernail, and woke up in the middle of the night sweating hot and pumped full of adrenaline and energy, as a result of the properties of tiger meat. what weight should i give his account? or what about the thousands of eye-witness accounts of ufo’s? or encountering elvis presely’s ghost? or being one with the eternal universe through meditation? or of being healed by homeopathy? or personal experiences of allah? or the ability of horoscopes to predict the future? or of mediums to contact murder victims and solve crimes? obviously every single religion has it’s own people who claim to have genuine first-hand experiences.
there are a multitude of apparently conflicting stories of first-hand experiences. do you agree that in the absence of my own personal first hand experience, i am best to rank all other accounts as equally (im)plausible, and then disregard them all until such time as i have my own personal experience? this is actually where i currently am. after being bought up christian, i realised i had no more (or less) reason to believe in jesus than to believe in anything else. so until such time as i have a reason, i believe in nothing, be it jesus or the tooth fairy.
other than your own personal experiences of the existence and divinity of christ, do you have any reason to believe? because if not then you’re just like me. was it gideon who needed a sign from god so he put out the fleece? well i’ve put out my own fleece, but got no sign, so what am i supposed to believe as a rational person? just take your word for it? i’m sure i’ve overlooked heaps of factors, and made a gazillion logical errors, so i would really enjoy it if you could do another article to elaborate more?