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Does the evidentialist have to endorse apostasy?

It's been a long time since we've had an apologetics post. I have a whole list of bad news items that I have thought of writing about under the all-too-apt heading of What's Wrong With the World, but instead, I've decided to write today about issues that are perennial.

Long-time readers know that I call myself an evidentialist in Christian apologetics. (See also here and here.) This means that I think that Christian faith both should be and can be based solidly on available evidence. I'm eclectic in this regard. I think St. Thomas Aquinas was an evidentialist as well. While my own special area of interest and focus has been on historical arguments for Christianity (e.g., for the reliability of the Gospels and the occurrence of the resurrection), and while I am not convinced by all of the purely philosophical arguments for the existence of God that are sometimes proposed, I am by no means hostile or opposed to a priori, metaphysical arguments. To the extent that they work, they are evidence as well. The more the merrier.

But lurking in the background of the evidentialist position is the following consideration: Is there some sense in which a person should not believe something beyond its support by the evidence that he has? Do we say that a person should apportion the strength of his credence to the strength of the evidence?

Let me hasten to add that a "yes" answer to this does not preclude a) the possession of maximal, foundational evidence for some particular proposition which is not inferred from anything else (such as his own existence) or b) the possession of and reliance on evidence that is, strictly speaking, available only to oneself (such as one's sensory experiences).

Strictly speaking, stating that in some sense Christian faith "should" be based on evidence does not commit oneself to this more global statement about apportioning one's strength of belief to the strength of the evidence, but they go rather naturally together. In that case, one's opposition to all forms of fideism or belief beyond evidence in the area of religion is an instance of a broader principle.

It gets tricky to define the precise sense of this "should," and that is partly why I have used the phrase "in some sense." After all, not all belief is voluntary, and even irrational belief sometimes seems morally excusable if it has been deliberately encouraged by one's teachers from one's youth upwards. Not everyone thinks explicitly about whether he is believing things reasonably or unreasonably, and it doesn't seem like everyone ought to do so or is even capable of doing so. But there certainly seems to be something suboptimal about irrational belief.

Suppose that I water down the "should" here and, at least for now, defend only the following proposition:

If you are sufficiently reflective to realize that you have been holding some belief irrationally or arationally, with a strength of conviction beyond what is warranted by any evidence that you actually have, you ought to change your credence level for that belief.

This immediately raises the following disturbing consideration: Suppose that a person--call him Joe--has been raised in a fideistic form of Christianity. Suppose for the sake of the argument that Joe has been deliberately taught that he should believe in God "just because," that he should trust the Bible "just because it's the Bible," that he should not look for any further argument, and indeed that to do so is to show himself weak in faith. Suppose that Joe has been taught to rely on the fact that he thinks he can feel Jesus living in his heart, rather as Mormons are taught to rely upon the "burning in the bosom." Needless to say, Joe has been given no apologetics teaching whatsoever in his church or by his parents.

Now suppose that Joe wakes up one fine morning and says to himself, "This is ridiculous. I have no more reason to believe that Christianity is true than any adherent of any religion incompatible with Christianity has to believe his religion. I've been hanging on to my Christianity just because it is part of my individual identity and the identity of the community I am a part of. And I'm even willing to lay down my life for this set of theological beliefs! Why am I thinking this way, when I don't even know if any of this is true?"

Joe is having a crisis of faith, and he's having it after a lifetime (though perhaps a rather young lifetime) of being entirely unprepared for it. Indeed, one might say that he has been anti-prepared. When he goes to his pastor, let's suppose that he is told that he just needs to accept that the Bible is the Word of God, just needs to cling to Jesus more closely, and that his doubts come from Satan.

Not only is that unlikely, psychologically, to help Joe in this crisis, it is questionable as to whether it should help Joe in this crisis. His questions are reasonable, given the absence of any defense he has ever been given for belief in his community's holy book and theological commitments.

But what am I saying? It sounds for a moment here like I'm saying that Joe should apostasize!

Considering that I am, after all, a Christian, that I want Joe (which is to say, all the real-life people like Joe) to go to heaven, and that I seriously doubt that he's going to go to heaven if he just becomes an agnostic or an atheist and goes through the rest of his life explicitly rejecting belief in the existence of God and/or the tenets of Christianity, that would seem to be a pretty shocking position to take.

My answer, however, is no. I do not recommend that Joe apostasize, and I certainly don't say that he should do so.

The first reason for this is that Joe should consider that he may have more reason than he realizes, and upon reflection, I think he will find that he does. The fact that those in his background have taught him to disregard evidence and to believe on subjective grounds does not mean that he does not have evidence. If a man were taught from childhood that he ought to believe that his father is loving and good without evidence, it would not mean that he would have no evidence if he stopped to think about the matter.

So it is for the existence of God. Joe knows of the existence of the world around him, and probably knows at least something of its appearance of orderliness and design. He knows of the existence of his own mind. To be sure, naturalism has its own attempts to account for the existence of these things, but perhaps Joe can see (even if only dimly as yet) for himself that these are unsatisfactory. He knows of the existence of morality and the appearance of meaning in life, which gives him a reason to think, at least, that there must be more to life than atoms bumping against each other in the void. All of these considerations tend strongly against either atheism or agnosticism concerning the existence of God himself, though they certainly (as I am envisaging it) need to be refined and strengthened in Joe's understanding.

As for the more specific doctrines of Christianity and of the monotheism of Judaism on which it was founded, the existence of the books of the Bible is, at a minimum, a datum. Without considering them at the outset as holy books, one still can ask where they came from and what the best explanation is for their contents.

At this point, things become a bit delicate, for Joe's own background, as I imagine it, has taught him nothing about how to evaluate the plausibility of such works.

But here I want to bring in the second point: Joe should not apostasize even from Christianity (much less from theism), because the evidence for Christianity is available, and Joe himself can find it.

If Joe were kept locked up on an island without access to the wider world by his pastor and parents, then he might have to pray desperately to a God about whose attributes he is now (perhaps against his own will) uncertain to help him get out and find more information. And, to be clear, I believe that God does send light to those who sincerely seek it and who, God knows, will accept that light if given it. Jeremiah 29:13 applies here, I believe: "You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart." Meanwhile, even Joe-locked-on-an-island can keep reading the Bible and can, hopefully, notice for himself some of the internal evidences that give the Gospels, for example, verisimilitude.

But things are not that dire in the real world. Joe has access to books and, presumably, to the Internet. To be sure, he could just as easily wander onto a "myther" web site on the Internet as onto William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith site or Apologetics315, but the fact remains that information is out there on questions like, "Why should I believe that the events in the Gospels took place?" and "How is the Bible different from other putatively holy books?"

Moreover, it's a pretty safe bet that, despite his fideistic upbringing, Joe has some friends or friends-of-friends who will recommend some good evidential material to him (perhaps, e.g., Lee Strobel's popular apologetics books) if he makes his doubts known, not only to his own immediate community but to the Christian community more widely.

This brings me to the importance of the inquiry. C.S. Lewis argues,

Here is a door, behind which, according to some people, the secret of the universe is waiting for you. Either that’s true, or it isn’t. And if it isn’t, then what the door really conceals is simply the greatest fraud, the most colossal “sell” on record. Isn’t it obviously the job of every man to try to find out which, and then to devote his full energies either to serving this tremendous secret or to exposing and destroying this gigantic humbug? (“Man or Rabbit?,” in God in the Dock, 111–112. HT to John DePoe for this reference.)

Since the question of whether Christianity is true or false is of such great moment, any light abandonment of the claims of Christianity, without doing due diligence, is epistemically irresponsible. The commitment to truth itself (an important part of the evidentialist position) means that we are bound to pursue truth and, indeed, that it can be a test of character for a man to be expected to make such an investigation rather than settling for a shallow and easy agnosticism.

The evidentialist is (I believe) bound to disagree with the Pascalian recommendation that one induce oneself to believe Christianity purely for reasons of utility. But it is crucially different to say that one should vigorously seek to discover whether there is good evidence for Christianity, and that one should do so because the stakes of missing out on the knowledge of God are so high. And, since I believe that there is such evidence, and that it is not hidden, a person who (like Joe) comes to have doubts upon reflection but who then engages in such a search can be rewarded with a Christian faith that is confidently based on fact.

In the end, those of us who watch struggles of faith from the other side--that is, from within Christianity--must have independent reason to have confidence in the justice of God. That is true whether or not one is an evidentialist. Indeed, if one is not, one must nonetheless account for the fact that God apparently "gives" some people a non-evidential confidence in Christianity but does not "give" this to others, since atheists and agnostics, after all, do exist. No position on evidence and apologetics offers a "get out of questions free" card concerning divine justice and salvation, since there will always be those who, it appears, never had a "real chance," whether one construes that chance in terms of receiving the best available evidence, the right upbringing, religious experiences, or firm feelings of confidence and assurance induced by the Holy Spirit.

For the evidentialist Christian, the confidence in the ultimate justice of God comes from the reasons that we do have to believe that God, who is by definition absolutely just and good, exists, loves us, and has revealed himself to us. It is, moreover, useful to see that the position does not create an actual contradiction--for example, it does not mean that a person in Joe's position both should and should not believe in God--and does not lead us to recommend apostasy to those who have been Christians and are now in the throes of mental crisis.

Comments (51)

How important is it to distinguish the mental act of "belief" from others, such as knowledge, opinion, theory, speculation, and doubt?

Joe might have been taught never to work at the "why" of his religious belief, but in this modern world he may well have been taught to do it in other fields. Suppose he took a degree in history, with a minor in archeology. In history he would have been trained in sifting evidence for events in the past, for which there can NEVER be solid proof because the events are not (by definition) repeatable under lab conditions. In archeology he would have received training in scientific test-and-prove methodology. With the pair of these, all one would have to say to him, upon his crisis of faith, is "do you have other tools to bring to bear on your doubts? If they are RIGHT to use in other fields, how can they steer you away from truth in this field? Truth is of a kind - it is all true, you don't get one kind of truth that has evidence for it, for which you ought to seek evidence, and then have another kind of truth for which there cannot possibly be evidence for it and for which seeking evidence is wrong. God doesn't separate out the kinds of truth that flow from Him that way.

Joe could be a good deal younger than that--say, in his late teens.

But of course I agree with you _completely_ that belief in God should not be isolated from evidence as I describe its being isolated in what Joe has been taught.

It's important to realize, however, that both liberal and conservative voices in a variety of traditions _do_ affirm precisely such an isolation. In secular circles it is the "fact-value" distinction. In liberal theological circles it is "the Christ of faith" vs. the "Christ of history." In a great many academic historians, including Christians, it's the affirmation that "as an historian" one cannot affirm that a miracle has taken place. At the popular level and in all too many churches, it is the emphatic divorce of faith from reason. I just was watching one of my favorite Southern Gospel groups last evening in a video I got for my birthday. I love their music, and the video is one of my favorite birthday presents, but I was cringing at a song called "It's a Faith Thing." Here are the lyrics:

http://chriswhitemusicpublishing.com/archives/3192

Yes, one _can_ interpret them in a way that is theologically unproblematic, but my strong suspicion is that they were intended in an anti-evidentialist and even somewhat anti-intellectual sense.

If Joe came and talked to me, or even if I were given the opportunity to write to him, I would _certainly_ encourage the kind of unified view of inquiry that you recommend, Tony. And more: I would point him to resources that support the truth of Christianity.

The harder question is this one: What if Joe never meets (either face to face or electronically) anybody like you or me? What if he never hears that? What situation is he in, epistemically?

And that's where I think that, if Joe is reflective and intelligent enough to have the worries that I have attributed to him, he can be held responsible to go on searching. After all, in the very worries I have suggested that he has, he realizes the _need_ for evidence and hence tacitly is _rejecting_ the fideism he has been raised with.

What happens most unfortunately with deconverts is that they fall between two stools: They half-reject fideism, perhaps as it has been taught to them, yet they accept what they have been taught about the lack of _existing_ evidence for Christianity. This is an interesting kind of double standard for the pronouncements of their parents, pastors, and teachers. Those previous authority figures are treated with a certain amount of contempt insofar as they told the young enquirer that he _ought_ to believe. But they are treated as knowing their stuff when it comes to telling the young enquirer (or tacitly implying) that real evidence for faith _is not available_. Some deconverts will even say things to the effect that, because they were Christians "all their lives," they must know "what can be said" for Christianity! Well, that's ridiculous! Precisely _because_ they know that they were raised in and part of a fideistic Christian tradition, they should realize that they were _not_ told "what can be said for" Christianity. They needed to look elsewhere for that information.

Heh, maybe he needs to rub shoulders with some people raised atheist, agnostic, and new-age, and who converted to Christianity. They _all_ had reasons for the change, and those reasons, while including personal experience, never END there (in my experience). The personal experience of Christ might be the initiator of "looking into" matters. Or, in one case, it was a direct, visible personal experience of Christ after examining all the evidence and concluding he needed to believe with faith, but had not yet been able to cross that gap, and effectively crying out for help to do so. Whenever I run into new Catholics I love to hear the story of their conversions. They are all unique, but they all have common elements, including sifting the evidence, and finding plenty to go on with.

It's important to realize, however, that both liberal and conservative voices in a variety of traditions _do_ affirm precisely such an isolation. In secular circles it is the "fact-value" distinction. In liberal theological circles it is "the Christ of faith" vs. the "Christ of history."

Sounds like yet another reason to take those liberal theological circles out in the woods and put a bullet in its head. How many times can they go on ignoring the basic riposte: if the Christ of History is not affirmed as "the real" Christ, the "Christ of Faith" is a mere fantasy, not faith. I know they don't care about that, but it turns my stomach to see this foisted off on people as "Christian".

Those previous authority figures are treated with a certain amount of contempt insofar as they told the young enquirer that he _ought_ to believe. But they are treated as knowing their stuff when it comes to telling the young enquirer (or tacitly implying) that real evidence for faith _is not available_.

That doesn't seem like a cogent criticism to me. Their belief that evidence is not available is likely based more on what they have learned under the tutelage of skeptics rather than on the authority of their former Christian teachers. Not that they just trust the skeptics' authority either, but they weighed the evidence themselves, and the influence of skeptics' arguments has caused them to misweigh it. Surely that's sufficient to explain why they think the evidence isn't there, there's no need to imagine that their belief in the lack of evidence is based on the authority of Christian teachers that they repudiate.

Your other criticism (of those who think they know what there is to be said for Christianity because they grew up Christian) I agree with.

That doesn't seem like a cogent criticism to me. Their belief that evidence is not available is likely based more on what they have learned under the tutelage of skeptics rather than on the authority of their former Christian teachers. Their belief that evidence is not available is likely based more on what they have learned under the tutelage of skeptics rather than on the authority of their former Christian teachers.
Your other criticism (of those who think they know what there is to be said for Christianity because they grew up Christian) I agree with.

Actually, what you are referring to in the first paragraph is closely related to what I said about those who think they know what there is to be said for Christianity because they grew up Christian. Believe me, there are many deconversion stories out there that include, "And when I went to my pastor with my questions, all he had to say was _____" (something lame and authoritarian), with the clear implication that they _gave Christianity a fair shake_ by going to that pastor with the questions.

So that was my point. Sure, to some extent they are also working under the tutelage of skeptics. But they are also assuming that "if there were more to be said for it, I would have heard about it" from the very same people who raised them to be fideists!

If the testimony of the Holy Spirit (Romans 8,16) is a necessary prerequisite for being a Christian (Romans 8,9, 8,14) there can be no true Christianity that is not based on evidence, as the testimony of the Holy Spirit constitutes evidence. This testimony is not a “burning in the bosom”, but simply the life transforming power of the Holy Spirit in a Christian (Romans 8,1-16, Galatians 5,16-26). So in my view a true Christian can or at least should never come into a situation when he has to arrive at the conclusion that there is no evidence for his faith.

I don't have any experience that I would call "the testimony of the Holy Spirit." I used to try to convince myself that I had some experience like that, but eventually I gave up trying. As far as life transformation, not to be brutal, but Alcoholics Anonymous does a pretty good job, too.

Don't misunderstand me: There are a few _incredible_ conversion stories that really do defy natural explanation. The Apostle Paul comes to mind as an obvious example. I posted here at W4 the video testimony of David Wood, who now runs an apologetics ministry to Muslims. He is another example.

But for a great many of us Christians, especially those like me who made a personal commitment to Christ at a very young age (I was four, and remember it clearly), the "life transforming power of the Holy Spirit" bears a rather notable resemblance to "growing more mature, self-controlled, and being formed by life experience." I believe that God works through such means, and I thank him for it all and give him all the glory for whatever improvement there has been within me over my approximately half-century of life: God knows that there was and still is loads of room for improvement. But I give God the thanks and glory because I have _other_ evidence for believing that He is the one to be credited with my character formation and improvement (which we Christians of course call "sanctification"), not because the work itself is so strikingly transformative that it constitutes particularly noteworthy evidence in and of itself.

I realize this is a rather "cold"-sounding response to a fairly common statement about the "work of the Holy Spirit," but I have to call 'em like I see 'em. So I'm not convinced that those references to the Holy Spirit's "bearing witness that we are the children of God" refer to evidence _to us_ of the truth of Christianity.

Lydia, I think the evidence of "life transforming power of the Holy Spirit" is that seen by you in others. For me, when I see (or read about) a Christian who forgives his persecutors even while they are persecuting him, that's evidence. That act of forgiveness is - in a thoroughly prosaic sense - not natural. It is OUTSIDE of the natural human motivational structure. It cannot be explained by nature. It is evidence of something miraculous working in that person's soul, something divine causing it. When I see it, I see evidence for Christianity. (The AA example doesn't work for this, since the motivation for getting out of the clutches of addiction is explainable in natural human terms. Though AA also generically involves explicit reference to God's help.) The evidence of the interior (and invisible) reality is the external, and entirely observable, action that is not natural. It is observable by OTHERS than the one doing the action. That's evidence for Christianity. And, sadly, that a young man or young woman has been raised Christian, but has not been raised to think of these actions as clear evidence for God's grace acting in men, even though the Bible pretty much says that, indicates a pretty anemic Christianity being preached to them.

Let's take one simple example: Isaac Jogues went preaching Christianity to the Iroquois, who tortured him mercilessly. Among other things, they ripped and burned off fingers so that he was canonically unable to say mass (you have to hold the Eucharist with certain fingers). He was carried away from there by Dutch, sent to France, healed up, and THEN WENT BACK. To more or less certain death. He COULD have stayed in France, using his disability as a perfectly valid basis for pursuing another sort of life devoted to good. But he went back, out of love. This is not nature acting, but God. (And, by the way, the purely historical record showing these events is utterly definitive, there is no way to doubt what happened because of the "mists of antiquity".)

Tony, I certainly agree that there are instances of life-transforming power of God in individual people's lives that are evidence of the existence of God and of the truth of Christianity. But usually when the "witness of the Holy Spirit" or "testimony of the Holy Spirit" is referred to as in Patrick's comment above, the definite intent is that a) it is something seen in _every_ real Christian, not just in notable cases, and b) it is something every real Christian experiences in himself. As I understand it, it is meant to be a kind of combination of some definite, internal experience (sometimes referred to as the "inner witness of the Holy Spirit") and observation in one's own life of the transforming power of the Holy Spirit.

for a great many of us Christians, especially those like me who made a personal commitment to Christ at a very young age (I was four, and remember it clearly), the "life transforming power of the Holy Spirit" bears a rather notable resemblance to "growing more mature, self-controlled, and being formed by life experience."

My experience is similar, and in talking with others, both adult converts and life-long Christians, I think it is common for those of us in the latter group to find the testimony of the Spirit in our hearts to be instrospectively invisible. Without a memory of a previous life outside of Christ, the Spirit's presence is like water to a fish: it disappears for lack of contrast.

But I don't think that warrants the conclusion that I don't have such an experience, and I don't believe you when you say you don't. Not because I think you're lying, but because I think you're mistakenly inferring its non-existence from your inability to perceive it.

I also agree with Patrick that it has evidential power. Even for you and me. Michael Polanyi in _Personal Knowledge_ argues that there is a tacit dimension to rationality, even in hard sciences. His case, I believe, is even stronger when it comes to historical reasoning. Tendencies to believe, or to find certain things more or less plausible, can be rational even if we cannot articulate why they are rational. You can tell that this is fake wood, even though you can't say what it is about its appearence that your conclusion is based on. You might be unable to persuade someone else (who sees the same thing you do, and thus on one level has the same evidence you do) that this is fake wood, not because he's being stubborn but because you just have no argument, and yet you really can tell that it's not wood, and your belief is rational and it is even based on evidence: you know it's not wood because of how it looks.

In the same way, the testimony of the Spirit can be evidential even if it is introspectively invisible: He causes us to perceive, when looking at the world and the Bible, that the world is God's world, and that His Word is true. A child who looks at the night sky and sees it as the work of God's fingers perceives something about it that an honest atheist doesn't. The child can give no argument (young children are often weak when it comes to articulate reasoning) defending his seeing-as as veridical, just as I can give no argument defending my perception of the fakeness of the wood. Yet it is abundantly reasonable for us to believe that the child's seeing-as is perceptual, and thus his belief in God is evidential in that it is supported by the evidence of his perception, even if it is not articulate.

Elsewhere, you noted that the hard-core libertarian "has no place in his theory for children." I would say the same is true of hard-core evidentialism. And not by accident. The enlightenment rationality that insisted we think for ouselves in a manner that undermined the authority of the church and of the Scriptures, the same enlightenment gave us the overweening principle of autonomy that is today destroying families and devouring the unborn. In truth, we never outgrow our lack of autonomy. By the same token, we never outgrow our lack of cognitive independence. We do grow into a greater measure of independence, just as we grow into a greater measure of choosing our own lives, but a look at the history shows that humans do not have the ability to transcend their historical situation. We make better or worse judgments within our situation. Believing what our parents, pastors, and fellow Christians assure us is true, even without being able to argumentatively defend it, _may_ be rational in an adult, as it certainly is in a young child. But just as it would be a bad thing for an adult to have no more autonomy than a child, so it a bad thing for an adult Christian to be unable to make an articulate case for the truth of his faith. A _measure_ of moral autonomy and a _meausre_ of cognitive independence are both good and healthy. It's the elevation of these things into a first principle that is a problem.

Actually, I agree with you strongly that the child is rational in believing what his parents and teachers tell him. By the same token, a Muslim child is rational in believing the Mohammad is the prophet of God because his parents tell him that. But sometimes increasing information takes _away_ the rationality of a previously rationally held belief, just as it _bestows_ rationality on other beliefs. (We can think of numerous examples of this in daily life--where what was rational to believe before ceases to be rational because we learn more.) So, both the Muslim and the Christian who have been relying solely or almost solely on confidence in the information of their teachers learn, eventually, that that isn't enough.

But I don't think in any event that the justified confidence that I had as a child in the worldview bestowed upon me by my parents is what is generally meant by "the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit." Rather, it was a valuable heritage they gave me in a way of seeing the world that was true. As such, it had "seeds" of all sorts of things in it that can be fleshed out and defended more explicitly to an older person--e.g., the argument from design (you mentioned seeing the stars as the work of God's fingers), the argument from reason, the moral argument, etc.

I think there are a lot of misconceptions out there about what evidentialism entails, and one of these is that inexplicit arguments are non-existent. Interestingly, that is one of the saddest aspects of an explicitly anti-evidentialist Christian background--as I hinted in the main post, it implies to people that they don't have evidence when they really do, even though that evidence is inexplicit. In contrast, a good evidentialist apologist, whether raising a child or informing a layman who is new to the subject, will tend to _flesh out_ and _draw attention to_ arguments that, to some extent, the person already has access to.

Similarly, a misconception is that the evidentialist must think that children are irrational to trust their parents.

I don't think that is true. However, I do think that at a certain point the young person becomes aware that there are people all over the world trusting _their_ parents and religious leaders just as he has been doing and being led thereby to non-Christian beliefs. Hence, at that point, he needs something _more_.

But I don't think in any event that the justified confidence that I had as a child in the worldview bestowed upon me by my parents is what is generally meant by "the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit."

Right. But when the child sees the stars as the handiwork of God, that's when the internal testimony is taking place (really it's more of a sensus divinitatis situation, but they overlap). Yet this seeing-as is preconditioned by that parentally bestowed worldview. No problem, right? The Spirit ordained the natural means to bring about those preconditions. Then the Spirit does something extra that builds upon His former work when the child looks at the stars, one night, and testifies internally to the child's heart.

I don't have in mind an age-appropriate version of some design argument. In the situation I'm envisioning, the child isn't engaged in argument at all. Just as when a child sees a tree, he doesn't typically construct an argument from premise "I'm having an experience that seems to be of a tree" to the conclusion that there is a tree there. Rather he simply takes his visual experience for a perception of a tree. He doesn't just see a splotch of color in his "visual field". He sees the tree, and sees it as a tree. And his belief that there is a tree in just that spot is evidentially grounded on that act of seeing-as, without argument.

both the Muslim and the Christian who have been relying solely or almost solely on confidence in the information of their teachers learn, eventually, that that isn't enough.

isn't enough for what? For a mature faith? Agreed. For a justified faith? What information is out there that would render a Christian's trust in the consensus fidelium unjustified? I can imagine certain peculiar situations where a Christian would have a defeator for that trust, but you seem to be talking about matters of general knowledge to adult Christians.

Lydia: “Don't misunderstand me: There are a few _incredible_ conversion stories that really do defy natural explanation. The Apostle Paul comes to mind as an obvious example. I posted here at W4 the video testimony of David Wood, who now runs an apologetics ministry to Muslims. He is another example.”

I don’t think that the testimony of the Holy Spirit has to be a life shattering experience. If, as the New Testament says, the Holy Spirit dwells in a Christian and drives him one should think that this somehow has to become apparent at least to himself. However, it may be that if one has turned to God at an early age and if one’s having been transformed by God has been a smooth development it may indeed be that the respective person is hardly aware of God’s work.

Lydia: “If Joe were kept locked up on an island without access to the wider world by his pastor and parents, then he might have to pray desperately to a God about whose attributes he is now (perhaps against his own will) uncertain to help him get out and find more information. And, to be clear, I believe that God does send light to those who sincerely seek it and who, God knows, will accept that light if given it. Jeremiah 29:13 applies here, I believe: "You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart."”

Answered prayers also constitute evidence for God. Moreover, if one seeks God this may also be due to being driven by the Holy Spirit.

Lydia: “But here I want to bring in the second point: Joe should not apostasize even from Christianity (much less from theism), because the evidence for Christianity is available, and Joe himself can find it.

[…]

But things are not that dire in the real world. Joe has access to books and, presumably, to the Internet. To be sure, he could just as easily wander onto a "myther" web site on the Internet as onto William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith site or Apologetics315, but the fact remains that information is out there on questions like, "Why should I believe that the events in the Gospels took place?" and "How is the Bible different from other putatively holy books?"”

What about the illiterate peasant living in Ethiopia? Or what about Christians who have lived in past centuries? Most if not all of the arguments for theism in general or Christianity in particular have not been around since the beginnings of Christianity. Neither the Kalam Cosmological Argument nor the Ontological Argument nor the Argument from Reason nor the Argument from the Fine-Tuning of the Universe was available to the early Christians. If one holds the view that one’s Christian faith should be based on evidence, there must be such kind of evidence that has been available to all Christians who have ever lived. The testimony of the Holy Spirit seems to me the only kind of evidence that meets this requirement.

was responding to your 1:43, I didn't see the other when I posted the above.

misconceptions out there about what evidentialism entails, and one of these is that inexplicit arguments are non-existent.

I agree that inexplicit arguments do exist, and that even the untutored and children can and do sometimes engage in such arguments. But I also think most justified beliefs are justified prior to being the subject of argument, explicit or otherwise. Not all rational grounding is argumentative. And children (and most adults) don't need to have even an inexplicit argument in order to be justified in most of their beliefs.

Typical Enlightenment-style evidentialism does require argument _of some kind_ for everything except a very narrow set of foundational beliefs, and it seems quite clear to me that no children and few if any adults have such arguments for every justified belief that they hold.

What about the illiterate peasant living in Ethiopia? Or what about Christians who have lived in past centuries?

Some of them might be more like Joe-on-an-island, but I think even they can do better than "blind faith in the village priest," and I think God will help them to do so if they become concerned that their previous blind faith is insufficient for present justification.

Most if not all of the arguments for theism in general or Christianity in particular have not been around since the beginnings of Christianity.

Not in their modern form, but actually there was a tradition of Judaic natural theology. I think that this is the tradition Paul is working in in Romans 1. In any event, I think you overestimate the extent to which I am arguing that these have to be put into their modern forms in order to have force and be available to a given individual.

Let me also point out that something like, "Why did these disciples stick their neck out like that if they were just lying?" is available to _anybody_ who reads the book of Acts or even has it read aloud to him, not treating it as part of a "holy book" but just treating it as a straightforward historical account of the early church. And indeed the testimony of the apostles was _hugely_ important in the early church. For many centuries, too, Christians were spared the dubious "blessing" of the nonsense of 19th century German criticism, so they actually had a _clearer_ opportunity to treat the texts sensibly and hence to see their evidential value. It is not true in all cases that the passage of time brings us better and more sophisticated arguments. Sometimes it entangles us in foolish, pseudo-sophisticated objections.

Christopher, I think we are just going to disagree on the extent to which what you call "just seeing something" or words to that effect is correctly identified as what I would call "tacit inference." The upshot is that we are going to think that a lot of the same people are justified, but we're going to analyze the source of their justification differently.

In any event, I'm pretty certain that the traditional concept of the sensus divinitatis is supposed to be _quite different_ from the conception of the "internal testimony of the Holy Spirit." For one thing, the former is supposed to be present in all men, while the latter is present only in Christians who have received the Holy Ghost. Mind you, I'm speaking as someone skeptical about either of these as forms of evidence. But right now I'm just making the point that what you are talking about concerning the young child looking at the stars does not really sound like what is usually meant by "the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit."

What about the illiterate peasant living in Ethiopia? Or what about Christians who have lived in past centuries?

Some of them might be more like Joe-on-an-island, but I think even they can do better than "blind faith in the village priest," and I think God will help them to do so if they become concerned that their previous blind faith is insufficient for present justification.

In addition, as Tim has pointed out, there is also evidence for Christianity inherent in the normal life of the Christian church – for example, in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper (“. . . whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes,” &c.). The key is that our hypothetical illiterate peasant is provided with a basic idea why he or she is to “eat this bread” and “drink this cup.”

Tom, good point, and I think your point is related to my point about the "illiterate peasant" who asks himself why the early disciples were willing to suffer death. In other words, the person realizes that what he has been given in church has been given to him because some people actually _knew_ something originally.

I wanted to go back to a question Christopher asked. He quoted the place where I said,


both the Muslim and the Christian who have been relying solely or almost solely on confidence in the information of their teachers learn, eventually, that that isn't enough.

and he asked,

isn't enough for what? For a mature faith? Agreed. For a justified faith? What information is out there that would render a Christian's trust in the consensus fidelium unjustified?

My point was just this: Children gradually realize _how fallible_ their parents are. They don't need to know this at first. Eventually that realization of parental fallibility gets to the point that they realize that these religious matters ("God loves you" "God sent Jesus to be born in a manger," etc.) may not be the kind of thing on which their parents actually know much more than the child himself does. Now, that depends, of course. If the parents _do_ have information on the reasons for Christian faith, one assumes that they will make this clear to the child as he grows older. But the child may in some families rightly conclude that all of them are just believing this because of a vague sense of tradition and piety and because it is important to them in some way to believe it. That is to say, he may rightly conclude that his own _approach_ to his faith is much the same as that of any pious believer in some other religion.


At that point, when he recognizes this sort of state of parity epistemically between his belief and that of someone in a completely different religion, his confidence based solely on the word of his parents becomes insufficient for his justification. He needs to look around and see if there is, for example, tacit information available that he and his parents haven't been accessing.

My own preference would be that _no_ Christian would have to "realize" that, because adult Christians would be better informed and would be able to start showing their children at a fairly young age the asymmetries between the evidential basis of Christianity and that of other religions. In other words, my preference would be for more evidentially aware Christian communities all over the world. But unfortunately, that doesn't always happen.

That's my preference as well. More than preference, the church has a mandate to teach these things, and when it doesn't do so it is failing in one aspect of its mission to defend the sheep from the wolves.

Eventually that realization of parental fallibility gets to the point that they realize that these religious matters may not be the kind of thing on which their parents actually know much more than the child himself does ... the child may in some families rightly conclude that all of them are just believing this because of a vague sense of tradition.

"Vague sense of" seems to be functioning as a question-begging pejorative here. His parents believe on the basis of tradition. This should undermine the child's confidence in their teaching (and his pastor's etc.) only if that fact makes it to be the case that they aren't in a position to know wherof they speak. But this is just the Enlightenment prejudice against prejudice. Discovering that your parents are just passing on to you what they recieved from their ancestors is not a reason to think their teaching is untrustworthy. Just the opposite. If they made it up themselves, that would be reason to doubt. It's also possible to run into particular reasons to think the tradition went wrong at some point, or that it was false from the start. But these would need to be actual reasons, not presumptions against tradition as such.

he may rightly conclude that his own _approach_ to his faith is much the same as that of any pious believer in some other religion. At that point, when he recognizes this sort of state of parity epistemically ...

"recognize" implies that there really is such epistemic parity, not that he just thinks there is. I would say that the Christian tradition is objectively more trustworthy than the Muslim tradition. So the right way to describe the situation is that Joe (or whoever) mistakenly comes to think that there is epistemic parity, when there is not. Isn't this true even on your account? Since you think untaught Christians have (cogent) inexplicit arguments, and Muslim's don't?

But I guess by epistemic parity you mean internalist parity. Ex hypothesi that kind of parity does exist: even if Joe has inexplicit arguments for his faith that aren't available to the Muslim, he doesn't know that he has them, so internalistically speaking, they are in the same boat. But why should this kind of parity be a problem for Joe? It would be a problem if the Muslim's belief were not justified. But you have said that a Muslim child is justified. When the Muslim child gets older and finds out that other people are internally justified in believing things that contradict his religion, believing what their pastor say just as he believes in what his Imam teaches, does this mean his faith is unreasonable? No, because for all he knows he might have inexplicit arguments that he is unaware of, where, say, Christians do not and/or his tradition might be objectively more trustworthy than theirs. In point of fact the opposite is the case, but he has not been provided with a reason to think so. The question is: If he was justified before, does the discovery of his internal epistemic parity with Christian children take away that justification? I can't see why it would. I can see why someone would say it would if they thought the Christian child was unjustified, as a hard-core evidentialist would urge. But if the Christian child _is_ justified, then the Muslim's similarity to him would be reason for thinking the Muslim too is justified. And vice versa. If epistemic parity provides either young person with a difficulty then it must do so by identifying something _wrong_ with the belief of the other. But to do that we have to look at an external feature of the belief: the Muslim's belief is false, or externalistically unreasonable. Or one can argue disjunctively: at least one of the two suffer from this external defect (they're contradictory, so at least one is false), but they are in a situation of parity, so ... but no, they are not in a situation of parity externally speaking, only internally, and for the Christian young person's faith to be internally like the Muslim young person's is a good thing.

To clarify: First, I'm not arguing that the discovery of internal parity is of no consequence. On the contrary, by it he acquires a duty to investigate the matter further: I would call it an imperfect duty, where you seem to think it a perfect duty. But the point is that what he has discovered is not that his present faith is "just like" the Muslim's in any problematic sense. What he has discovered is that he is presently unable to explain what it is about his belief that makes it superior to the Muslim's. Discovering this fact does not constitute a reason for him to think there isn't anything that makes his belief superior to the Muslim's. (Unless we bring in the premise: if his belief were superior he would most likely be able to explain why. That might be a reasonable premise if he were well-educated. But he isn't. So his inability to explain is no surprise.) And so if he doesn't investigate further; whether because his other duties don't give him leisure to do so, or because he follows the advice of his teachers who tell him he shouldn't, or because he's just negligent; we have no reason to conclude that his continuing to believe in Christianity is unjustified.

Secondly, I'm not saying there couldn't be some other information that really would reasonably undermine someone's trust in the Christian tradition. Only that the discovery of merely internal epistemic parity doesn't do that.

Finally, all of this isn't what I would say to Joe. The most effective way of responding to his difficulties is to show him the evidential arguments. If I were given a few years with him, I might also want to show him a critique of Enlightement-style evidentialism, since it's quite influential and might well influence him, and I believe it unreasonably exacerbates reasonable doubts. But the main thing is to answer the reasonable doubts in a reasonable way, with evidence.

I would say that the Christian tradition is objectively more trustworthy than the Muslim tradition. So the right way to describe the situation is that Joe (or whoever) mistakenly comes to think that there is epistemic parity, when there is not. Isn't this true even on your account? Since you think untaught Christians have (cogent) inexplicit arguments, and Muslim's don't?

Good questions, Christopher.

Let us try to make this situation particularly difficult for the believer. Suppose that he has been taught to believe Christian tradition _just because it is tradition_. No other reason. Just faith in the truth of his own tradition because it exists. And that's what he sees when he goes to examine his belief. Now, if that really were all there were to it, then realizing that others have the same type of basis for contradictory beliefs is evidence of the fallibility of the method of following human tradition as a guide to religious truth. Obviously: For if various people are all following this same method faithfully and coming to conflicting results, then some of them must be wrong (indeed, most of them must be wrong, since there is such wide disagreement on such fundamental matters), which calls into question the reliability of the method.

Now, what is a major problem with this approach, as applied to Christianity? The problem with this approach that has been taught to Joe is that it treats the tradition as a "black box"--you input a religious question and get an output, and you're supposed to accept the output.

To the extent that all that Joe has is such a black box, the discovery that other people are using the same type of black box approach and getting wildly varying results *does* undermine Joe's justification.

I am, in fact, an internalist about justification, and this is why I think that at this point Joe really has to get beyond the black box approach.

Now, the great thing about Christianity is that it isn't _really_ a black box, even if Joe has been taught to think of it as one. He can read the Bible for himself, for example. Or if he's illiterate, get an audio book or find someone to read it to him. He can ask questions. He can think more about what he already has learned.

So if he's been taking this black box approach and is then negligent of further investigation after coming to the kind of realization I picture in the main post, I do consider him epistemically unjustified. He absolutely should not listen to some teacher who tells him just "not to worry about it" and who discourages further investigation.

Notice, by the way, that the very _possibility_ of having the kind of crisis envisaged in the main post entails a certain degree of intelligence, reflectiveness, and self-awareness. Uneducated (in some ways) or not, a Christian who can even think of that issue already has abilities that come with responsibilities. To whom much is given, from him much is required.

that the very _possibility_ of having the kind of crisis envisaged

I would point out a distinction here: It would be right, at this point, for Joe to question his status as "justified" in adhering to various elements of his received teaching. Questioning is a different mental act from doubting. When a person has faith, he ought not doubt, for doubt is incompatible with the assurance of faith, and faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. To lose assurance by doubting just is to lose the faith. Hence Joe can cultivate the habit of questioning without doubting: "Let's see, just how is it that I can be assured of these things, when a Muslim has a kind of parity of feeling...?"

I think it is common for those of us in the latter group to find the testimony of the Spirit in our hearts to be instrospectively invisible.
Not because I think you're lying, but because I think you're mistakenly inferring its non-existence from your inability to perceive it.

I also agree with Patrick that it has evidential power.

Since you think untaught Christians have (cogent) inexplicit arguments, and Muslim's don't?

But I guess by epistemic parity you mean internalist parity.

I have to say, I am still puzzled and confused about how you guys are using the expressions like "inexplicit arguments" "evidential power" even when not apprehended, and "internalist parity" that is epistemical parity. Is it possible to ask you to give EXAMPLES of some of these - maybe even examples of non-religious instances of these - to hang our discussion on?

For me, I can't quite fathom how something that I am unable to apprehend (unable to perceive, not aware it exists) can constitute to me evidence of something.

I am also wondering why it is that we should think that EVERY Christian has some specific "inner witness of the Holy Spirit", when we think that a Christian child is epistemically parallel to a Muslim child, and we DON'T think the Muslim child has such inner testimony.

To my eyes, the presence of the Holy Spirit dwelling in the soul of a Christian is validated by evidence of that indwelling, and evidence must comprise something perceived. To the Christian himself, it can be an interior experience, but it must be an experience that evinces a conscious response like "this is Other than just me", it cannot be an experience that leaves him UNAWARE of that Other Being as present. To a Christian old enough to have heard about those in other religions who think THEY have interior guidance to the truth, the Christian can no longer count on a wholly interior experience as the ground for assurance without that experience constituting something DISTINCTIVE that is not epistemically parallel with those of competing religions. St. James' letter provides something distinctive: the indwelling of the Spirit results concrete in acts of love and friendship with God, acts conformed to the Spirit. These acts are witness both to the Christian himself and to others - both alike.

I agree that there is another kind of witness, an interior experience, that is unmistakably divine, but I have not heard that this is universal to Christians. Quite the opposite, many saints insist that it is NOT universal, that it is in fact quite rare, and is not something that you seek out but that God chooses to bestow where He will. St. Teresa of Avila, in "The Interior Castle", says quite plainly that as a Christian moves forward in the spiritual life, he will have many interior experiences from God's hand, but that these can also be mimicked by natural or demonic causes as well - and as a result a Christian cannot trust to his own sense as to whether they are from God or not. It is not until the last, most intimate and complete kind (which is variously referred to as "spiritual marriage" or "spiritual union") that we come to something that about which you cannot err on whether it is from God, because no created power can cause it - or even seem to. (And, not all the saints experience it, as Mother Teresa appear not to have.) All lesser interior experiences, seemingly, are not sure signs.

I am also wondering why it is that we should think that EVERY Christian has some specific "inner witness of the Holy Spirit", when we think that a Christian child is epistemically parallel to a Muslim child, and we DON'T think the Muslim child has such inner testimony.

Right. I do _not_ think that every Christian has a specific inner witness of the Holy Spirit. That is why I think that a Christian young person can wake up one day and reasonably think that he is epistemically in much the same situation as a Muslim young person who just happened to be raised differently. Until, that is, he thinks more carefully about the matter or looks into the matter more. But when he does so, I think it unlikely that he'll find the "inner witness of the Holy Spirit" as one of the special resources that he comes up with, because I think a lot of Christians don't have any such experience that is of evidential help to them.

Those who do believe in such an inner witness (Patrick and to some degree Christopher) and think that all and only Christians have it do _not_ think that the Christian young person even can be epistemically in the same situation as the Muslim, because the former has the inner testimony of the H.S. and the latter doesn't.

For me, I can't quite fathom how something that I am unable to apprehend (unable to perceive, not aware it exists) can constitute to me evidence of something.

I agree with you, Tony, and there you are showing yourself to have what epistemologists would call "internalist" instincts.

Now, this gets a little tricky, because sometimes people really are tacitly relying on things as evidence, really tacitly basing their beliefs on those things, that they need to think about a bit in order to bring to the fore.

But in the main post when I said that Joe may have better evidence than he realizes, I was more envisaging a case where that evidence is available to him but where he is not _yet_ actually basing his belief in God or Christianity on that evidence.

The basing relationship, I admit, is notoriously difficult to parse out in epistemology, especially for those of us who have a pretty broad concept of tacit inference.

As an illustration, I would say that a person who looks at, say, a diagram of the structure of the eye and is overcome with the thought, "That never came about by chance" is engaging in a tacit design argument. In contrast, a person who has _seen_ a diagram of the structure of the eye but has not happened (at all) to think of it in connection with the question of the origin of the eye may be said to _have_ at least approximately the same evidence as the first person but not be _basing_ his belief in God as creator on it, and this can be true even if the second person _does_ believe that God is the creator.

OK, so Joe has data that he is aware of, he is just not ALSO aware that the data can be used to argue to God's presence or to the validity of the claims of the faith. That sounds to me like actual evidence but only a potential justification argument. It is not, I think, an implicit argument justifying acceptance of the truths of the faith. For an implicit justifying argument is, still, a kind of argument being made, and by assumption he is NOT YET making such implications.

Surely all men raised as Christians have an early moment where they harbor exactly ZERO implicit or explicit arguments for justification of their belief. (I don't consider a 3-year old's belief in angels because Mommy tells him, to constitute an implicit argument, it is WE who add the "because" inference, not him). And hopefully all men who are really adults in the faith will have at least some implicit arguments of same. So, presumably, every such person has to pass through a moment where they HAD no justifying arguments, and then they acquire something of the kind. To me, it seems incredibly unlikely that in every single case the very first such justification to occur is that of "testimony of the Spirit in our hearts" (even assuming for hypothetically that this is an available datum to every such Christian), because of its highly obscure nature AS EVIDENCE. Children, even teens, are more easily led to consider and grasp the material and sensible than the interior and immaterial. They are naturally going to get at data, and at arguments of justification, that are more easily considered, first. Hence, even for someone who is prepared to say that the inner testimony of the Spirit is "in" all Christians, he should realize that the success of that phenomenon to constitute a perceived datum AND A JUSTIFICATION (even implicit) is almost certainly going to come after other justifications of faith have occurred, and therefore may always borrow off the earlier justifications to some extent.

Tony, you say:

It would be right, at this point, for Joe to question his status as "justified" in adhering to various elements of his received teaching. Questioning is a different mental act from doubting. When a person has faith, he ought not doubt, for doubt is incompatible with the assurance of faith ... Joe can cultivate the habit of questioning without doubting: "Let's see, just how is it that I can be assured of these things, when a Muslim has a kind of parity of feeling...?"
I'm very sympathetic with this. But it runs afoul of Lydia's principle, "If you are sufficiently reflective to realize that you have been holding some belief irrationally or arationally, with a strength of conviction beyond what is warranted by any evidence that you actually have, you ought to change your credence level for that belief." Hence my zeal to argue against that principle (as she intends it).
Is it possible to ask you to give EXAMPLES of some of these - maybe even examples of non-religious instances of these - to hang our discussion on?
I gave an example from Polanyi: fake wood. Another example would be your ability to recognize when someone of your acquaintance walks in a room. You form the belief that so-and-so is present. But on what basis? Well, you can see his face. But what is it about that appearance that justifies you in believing it is so-and-so? Before he walked in the room you could have given a description of him, but that description would most likely fit a thousand other people who look similar to him, but not just like him. If any of them had walked in the room, you would know that its not him. So your ability to tell that it is him outruns your ability to argue from explicit facts about the appearance you are presented with to the conclusion that it is so-and-so who appears before you.

But this is not some mystical thing. The visual gestalt that stands as evidence for you is present to you. That experience consists not just in seeing shapes and colors; it it not just "seeing," it is "seeing as." There is certainly something about the shapes and colors that warrants your "seeing as." But you cannot sufficiently explain _what_ it is about the shapes and colors you see that warrants you in seeing them as the appearance of that person. My conclusion is that a "seeing as" can be warranted, and can stand as evidence for a belief, even if one cannot say what it is about the experience that gives it that evidential power.

As for the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit, when I say it has evidential power, I'm not saying that the Spirit's internal presence constitutes evidence. With regard to the experiences I'm talking about, the Spirit stands not as object but as agent. I hear the prologue of John's Gospel proclaimed on a certain occasion. It strikes me powerfully, and indeed seems to me to be the very word of God, not just the word of man. Not only do I hear it and believe that it is the word of God. I hear it _as_ the word of God. "Seeing as" (or "hearing as") is different from seeing plus believing. When I look at the moon near the horizon it seems bigger than when it is high in the sky. But I don't believe that it really is bigger. My non-belief doesn't stop me from still seeing it as bigger. So "seeing as" is something different from seeing plus believing. And while I always believe John 1 is God's word, I don't always hear it as God's word.

But on this particular occasion I do. And my experience, in that moment, has a certain character, a character that inclines me to believe that it is, as it seems, a divine speech-act addressed to me. Yet I can't explain what it is about my experience that justifies that inclination. I don't perceive the Holy Spirit working in me. He is as invisible to me as the wind. But His agency might nevertheless be what accounts for the fact that I hear the proclamation _as_ God's word in that moment, and for the evidential power that experience has for me.

the Christian can no longer count on a wholly interior experience as the ground for assurance without that experience constituting something DISTINCTIVE that is not epistemically parallel with those of competing religions
The Christian's experience must in fact be distinctive, but it is not necessary that the Christian be able to tell what it is about it that makes it distinctive. There is something distinctive about how this bit of fake wood appears to me that makes it reasonable for me to believe that it is fake wood. But I cannot articulate what it is about that appearance that makes it different from how real wood looks.
the indwelling of the Spirit results concrete in acts of love and friendship with God.
But, for me and Lydia,
the "life transforming power of the Holy Spirit" bears a rather notable resemblance to "growing more mature, self-controlled, and being formed by life experience.
These things could be explained as the supernatural work of the Spirit, but they could also be explained as the natural result of being raised by decent parents in a pious home. So they don't justify our assurance if Lydia's evidentialism is true.

Lydia,

Just faith in the truth of his own tradition because it exists. ... treats the tradition as a "black box"--you input a religious question and get an output, and you're supposed to accept the output.

Am I to understand that Joe has been taught that there isn't anything about the Christian tradition that makes it trustworthy? in particular more trustworthy than any other religious tradition? If this is the idea, then Joe has a real undermining defeator to deal with. But this isn't what real life fideists say. They don't say we should have faith in our tradition "just because it exists".

Perhaps you mean not that Joe has been taught that there isn't anything that makes the Christian tradition more trustworthy, but only that he hasn't been taught (explicitly) that there is.

But he has been taught to trust it. If I teach you to trust X I am thereby implicitly teaching that X is trustworthy. So the only problem is he hasn't been told _why_ the Christian tradition is any more trustworthy than any other tradition (and he has been told, absurdly, not to ask that question). And that is indeed a problem. But it doesn't give him reason to think the Christian tradition is not trustworthy.

The discovery that other people are using the same type of black box approach and getting wildly varying results *does* undermine Joe's justification.
It's precisely because it's a black box that that result doesn't follow. "Black box" means that Joe doesn't know anything about how or why it works. He can't "see inside" it. For precisely that reason, he has no idea how similar or different its workings are from that other black box over there.

But, you will say, even if the traditions are not the same, Joe's _approach_ to his tradition is the same as the Muslim's approach to his. The boxes may be different but the approaches are the same.

So what? Joe never put his trust in his approach to his tradition. He trusts his tradition, the box itself.

Let me put it this way: there has to be some daylight between (a) showing Joe his inability to give a reason why his faith in the Christian tradition is justified, and (b) giving Joe a reason why his faith in the Christian tradition is unjustified. But evidentialism seems to be pushing Joe to respond to objection (a) as if it had the strength of objection (b). Objection (a) has some strength, and Joe's concerns are reasonable, but it would be unreasonable for him to treat (a) as if it were tantamount to (b). That's what I mean when I say evidentialism unreasonably exacerbates reasonable doubts.

Christopher, I think you need to distinguish between, "Joe, if he approaches Christian tradition as a black box and realizes this, realizes that he has reason to think the tradition unreliable" and "Joe, if he approaches Christian tradition as a black box and realizes this, lacks reason to think the tradition reliable." I am certainly not saying that he should think that the tradition itself *is unreliable.* What I am saying is that, if he cannot (yet) think of any evidence *for* its reliability, and he realizes that relying on some tradition or other is not, per se, a reliable method of acquiring beliefs, then, "My tradition says x" ceases to be a good reason for him, taken by itself, to believe x.

Fortunately, there is a way out of this, because the Christian tradition *is* reliable, and Joe can figure out why. And if I had my druthers, he'd move pretty much seamlessly, and early, from, "Huh, I need to find out more about this, since all I've got at the moment is, 'Pastor and Dad say so'" to "Hey, cool, look at all this evidence!"

In fact, with good information given at age-appropriate times, there would never even need to be an intellectual crisis at all. (There might well be something more like an existential crisis when suffering comes along, but that, too, will be much better sustained against a solid evidential background.)

I'm sure this won't come as a surprise to you, Christopher: I think that if you "see wood as fake" you're cuing, if tacitly, to actual, discernible properties of the wood that are better explained by its being fake than by its being real. Or, for that matter, if you know wood and "see wood as real" in a particular case.

And the same for your acquaintance. The image of your acquaintance really has certain properties--height, facial feature appearance, way of moving, and on and on--which is what you are cuing to when you "see the person as" your acquaintance.

I find it really difficult to make any similar case concerning John 1, much as I love John 1. If one's experience of it "as the word of God" is strictly speaking not explicable (I don't just mean that you can't figure out the explanation at the moment) in terms of _discernible properties_ of John 1 that make it "genuinely word-of-God-like," then the analogy simply doesn't hold at all.

Now, certainly John 1 has some good and interesting properties--apparent profundity of ideas, fascinating language. If one knew a lot about 2nd-Temple Judaism one might recognize the fascinating way in which it both builds upon and goes far beyond ideas current at the time, which would be an interesting clue. But at that point we're _well_ beyond what I think you have in mind for your experience of "hearing it as the Word of God." As far as properties of the passage in itself, I don't think there is anything that corresponds to the properties of fake wood (or real wood) that can underwrite the comparison that I think you want to make. One could, I fear, have a similar experience in response to some passage from Confucius or the Bhagavad Gita or some other mystical text that was not, in fact, the Word of God, because the actual features of the text, taken by itself, that one is cuing to are not really so distinctive as _all that_.

Another example would be your ability to recognize when someone of your acquaintance walks in a room. You form the belief that so-and-so is present. But on what basis? Well, you can see his face. But what is it about that appearance that justifies you in believing it is so-and-so? Before he walked in the room you could have given a description of him, but that description would most likely fit a thousand other people who look similar to him, but not just like him. If any of them had walked in the room, you would know that its not him. So your ability to tell that it is him outruns your ability to argue from explicit facts about the appearance you are presented with to the conclusion

Yeah, I was afraid of that. We are not using the term "belief" univocally and with precision. And as a result I don't know if we are even addressing the same issues.

One of the standard ways of defining faith is as an example of the category of mental act, "belief". And belief is distinguished from such things as knowledge, opinion, estimation, approximation, hypothesis, and conjecture. Knowledge is where the intellect assents firmly, without reserve, because it holds adequate evidence for that kind of assent through its own light. Belief is distinguished from knowledge not by the degree of affirmation, but by the source of the assurance: with belief, you do NOT have adequate apprehension of the fact through the power of your own intellect to justify such assent without reserve. Your adherence to the fact is stronger than your evidence or your apprehension of it as knowable. The typical way for this to come about, then, is to rely on the knowledge of another whom you trust. Thus I affirm without reserve things that my wife knows, but I don't know, by reason of my trust in her and her knowledge (and in her truthfulness and in her carefulness in stating what she knows). It is not of the light of my own grasp of the fact that I adhere to it, but my wife's apprehension of adequate grounds for unreserved assent. And because it is not through my OWN intellectual light that I assent, I am FREE not to assent, and it requires an act of will to command the intellect to adhere to the truth posited. Faith is an assent of this kind, where the source of our assent is in God, who both knows, and is truthful. Opinion is an assent WITH reserve, so like belief we assent without knowledge (without adequate grounds of our own for unreserved assent), but unlike belief we have reservations about it.

I don't think that the above "You form the belief that so-and-so is present" ought to be called "belief". You make a kind of assent about his presence, but for the kind of assent you make you have and hold all of the appropriate evidence and grounds for that assent. There is not some body of knowledge external to your grasp that you are relying on blindly. If from a modest distance you are uncertain if it is Joe or his brother Bill, you withhold complete assent until you gather more evidence. I think the kind of apprehension you have is the conjoining of sensory information with the operation of other quasi-sensory functions, including a "common sense" (in Aristotelian terms - e.g. a sense-related faculty that responds to multiple types of sensory inputs and perceives them as the same object) and an estimative faculty, a comparative function, etc - none of which require rational intellect, for animals do as much. (There are also imagination and memory, more sense-related faculties).

But you cannot sufficiently explain _what_ it is about the shapes and colors you see that warrants you in seeing them as the appearance of that person.

I would propose that "you cannot sufficiently explain" because the operation is not that of the intellect but other faculties, and the intellect can receive their results, it cannot observe their operation directly, any more than you intellectually directly observe the interior component parts of seeing red in the apple.

But I don't believe that it really is bigger. My non-belief doesn't stop me from still seeing it as bigger.

True again. Your "seeing as" bigger is an operation of the (quasi-sensory) estimative faculty, which is not of the intellect. Your mind reasons perfectly well to the CONCLUSION that it is not bigger, but your estimative faculty is not subject to the intellect that way.

Nor are all of the assent acts of the intellect based on a reasoned out argument, whether explicit or implicit: the immediate grasp of self-evident principles (e.g. The whole is not less than the proper part) does not occur by some quick and subtle "proof" or argument, too subtle to perceive; it occurs un-mediately, with the mere apprehension of the meanings of the words used as terms in the proposition. Yet this sort of assent is that of knowledge: the mind perceiving with the thesis also the adequacy of the apprehension to unreserved affirmation. So there is no disjuncture between the kind of assent given and the adequacy of the grounds of that assent.

It strikes me powerfully, and indeed seems to me to be the very word of God, not just the word of man. Not only do I hear it and believe that it is the word of God. I hear it _as_ the word of God.

Annnnnd, I am not convinced. There is no sensory faculty whose object is "word of God", and no quasi-sense faculty whose operation is to apprehend "word of God", like that of the common sense by which you apprehend the _unity_ of "red" and "smooth" and "cool" and "heavy" when you hold a bowling ball. If the act occurs, it occurs in the intellect. And there, it is either an operation of reasoning (i.e. discursive, from step to step), either inductive or deductive, or not. Now, you suppose that it is not that of step-by-step reasoning, so it is presumably a non-discursive operation. But what? The ones we are aware of are (a) grasping a concept (which underlies our ability to define abstract notions) or (b) apprehension of self-evident principles. Yet you say it sometimes happens and sometimes not. But this is not a characteristic of these operations of the intellect.

Going back to a standard (Catholic) explanation, I think, it is that in the act of faith, God himself moves the will to command the intellect to assent. (Thus the act of faith is ALWAYS a gift from God). This event, though, is not EVIDENCE for itself: the intellect does not OBSERVE God moving the will to command the intellect and thus argue that it has an adequate basis for assent under its own natural light. The movement comprising the act of faith cannot be evidentiary grounds for assent to the faith, can it? That doesn't seem right.

For truths that we perceive as being related to the faith in a wholesome manner, (like when we read a passage and feel that this passage was written FOR ME TODAY (along with being written for 50,000 other reasons, God being God), there is no reason to claim that we adhere to THESE in the same unreserved sense that we adhere to the faith. It is sufficient, for its purpose, that we consider it probable, that is adequate to the choice of acting upon it. And so this clarifies the difference between articles of faith, which have not only an interior action by God moving us himself to assent, but ALSO an exterior guide (the Bible, the Church), from acts of conforming assent that are worthy and well-made, but not those of faith: we cannot RELY on our own interior sense of affirmation, independently from the Church, as a reliable witness sufficient for unreserved assent.

I recognize the existence of inarticulate argument. I don't admit the existence of subconscious argument.

... you're cuing, if tacitly, to actual, discernible properties of the wood that are better explained by its being fake than by its being real.

As stated, this is perfectly sensible, but it also doesn't disagree with anything I said. I agree that one is "cuing to" certain things about the look of the fake wood, and that IF one were to investigate further, one could, in principle, tease apart those properties from the gestalt that is present to you, and work them up into an argument. But in the moment when you first perceive that the wood is fake, you have not (consciously) done this. Those properties are present in how the wood appears to you -- they are perceived -- but they are not discerned. The fact that they are discernible is irrelevant. If I don't actually discern them I can't construct an argument taking them as premises.

But you want to say that I do have an argument when it is phenomenologically evident that I do not have a conscious argument. So you must posit a subconscious argument. To this sort of posit I have two responses.

First, isn't this squeezing the facts to fit the theory instead of allowing the theory to be falsified by the facts?

Second, if you do this, what is the point of internalism? If we can't generally tell whether we have an argument or not, then it becomes well nigh impossible for anyone to show us that we don't have an argument. So when Joe discovers that _as far as he can tell_ he doesn't have a reason for believing the Christian religion, from MY perspective he probably doesn't have a reason (if 'reason' means argument), but from YOUR perspective, a huge number of everyday beliefs are justified by subconscious arguments. So when Joe discovers that, as far as he can tell, he has no argument, he does NOT thereby acquire a good reason to think he doesn't have a subconscious argument. Not just Joe, but anybody with any belief that "just seems right" to them. When they discover that they have no argumemt, all they have _really_ discovered is that as far as they can tell they have no argument. It's possible they do have (presently) an argument they are unaware of. And this isn't just a distant possibility. On your view, it happens all the time.

... you need to distinguish between, "Joe, if he approaches Christian tradition as a black box and realizes this, realizes that he has reason to think the tradition unreliable" and "Joe, if he approaches Christian tradition as a black box and realizes this, lacks reason to think the tradition reliable."

Good distinction.

On my view, is it the case that I lack reason to think the wood is fake? Of course I know you disagree with my view, but I'm just asking how my view should be described. Is it a fair use of English to say that, on my view, I have a reason, but not an argumentative reason? Or can the word 'reason' not bear that? Certainly my view says that I am "reasonable" in believing the wood is fake, even without argument. But do I have "a reason?" Or should I rather say that I lack a reason but I have "grounds" or a "rational basis" for my belief that the wood is fake.

Take your pick:

1) "Joe, if he approaches Christian tradition as a black box and realizes this," does not lack a reason to think the tradition reliable, he only lacks an argumentative reason. But lots of our beliefs lack argumentative reasons and are perfectly reasonable for us to continue believing, even after we realize our lack of argumentative reasons for them. So when Joe realizes he lacks an argumentative reason, it doesn't follow that he should stop believing on the basis of tradition, even if that remains a black box approach for him.

2) "Joe, if he approaches Christian tradition as a black box and realizes this, lacks reason to think the tradition reliable." But I lack reason for thinking this wood is fake, yet it is perfectly sensible for me to believe that it is fake, even when I realize that I lack reason for this belief. In the same way it is, or may well be, perfectly sensible for Joe to keep believing on the basis of tradition even though he lacks a reason to do so.

That's what to say if I'm right in thinking that I don't have an (argumentative) reason for believing this wood is fake.

If you're right in thinking I do have an argument for that, then suppose Joe happens to have a tacit argument for his trust in his tradition that he is unaware of. How shall we describe this on your view? In that case, is it still right to say that Joe is approaching his tradition as a black box? Functionally it is black box because he can't say why it's any better than any other tradition. But since he does after all have argumentative reasons for trusting it, perhaps it's not really a black box.

But then how can Joe ever "realize" that his trust in tradition is a black box approach if its being a black box approach depends on whether he has subconscious arguments for it, and he can't tell whether he has those arguments or not?

On the other hand, if the lack of _conscious_ arguments is sufficient for it being a black box approach, then continuing to believe something even after you realize you have a black box approach to it (i.e., you have no conscious argument for it) is in many cases (even on your view) perfectly reasonable. And may well be in Joe's case too.

Tony, I don't think we disagree very much.

the kind of apprehension you have is the conjoining of sensory information with the operation of other quasi-sensory functions, including a "common sense" ... and an estimative faculty, a comparative function, etc - none of which require rational intellect ... the intellect can receive their results, it cannot observe their operation directly.

I agree. And this shows why Lydia is wrong to think Aquinas was an evidentialist (in her sense).

I also agree that there is a great disanalogy between my perception of fake wood and my experience of hearing John 1 as God's word. You are exactly right in describing that difference: my natural faculties are sufficient to perceive the wood as fake. Everything that leads me to assert that the wood is fake is present in my senses, and my natural, subintellectual faculties are adequate to "cue into," as Lydia puts is, those aspects of the sensation and deliver to my intellect the apprehension of fakeness. Whereas hearing John 1 as God's word goes beyond any natural power I have. If (as I claim) that experience is justifying, it is so because of the Spirit's exercise of power, which is invisible to me, outside of my apprehension.

But my argument was not attempting to show that my belief in John 1 is probably justified by that experience, because it's the same sort of thing as perceiving fake wood. It's not the same sort of thing at all, except in one respect: they both aren't the result of argument. My reasoning was aimed solely against the evidentialist position. According to evidentialism, when you see that you don't have an argument, you are unjustified to continue believing as you did before (except for foundational things like self-evident propositions). The evidentialist says, "Joe realizes he doesn't have an argument, so he is not justified in continuing to believe." I say, as the fake wood example shows, it isn't true that one always needs an argument (even for non-foundational beliefs) in order to be justifed in continuing to believe. I haven't pretended to show that Joe IS justified. Only that the evidentialist objection gives us no reason to think he isn't.

Lydia and I weren't engaged in a discussion of the difference between faith and other kinds of belief, or assent. Lydia bases her faith on probablistic reasoning anyway, so in answering her, I was only concerned to address the question of whether one is reasonably assenting to, say, the content of John 1, when it seems to one that one is hearing the word of God.

I have no objection to your claim that in faith, properly so called, God moves the will directly (and if He does that it wouldn't seem right to call _that_ "evidence.") But I don't see why he couldn't also work in the manner I described. Whether he actually does or not is a theological question. Philosophically, I'm claiming that He may be working in that way (we don't have philosophical grounds to say he isn't) and if He is, I'm not flouting my epistemic duties in thinking that John 1 is the word of God when it appears so to me.

Christopher, I don't think it's actually all that deeply mysterious as to what one is cuing to in "seeing the wood as fake" or "seeing the person across the room as my friend Bill."

I'm not making this notion of tacit argument as deeply buried and difficult (nigh impossible) to access as you apparently think I am making it.

One philosopher with a sense of humor has said that the easiest refutation of direct realism is having a man who needs glasses walk around for an hour or two without his glasses.

The point being that one pretty quickly realizes that one has clearer and less clear visual experiences and that these give one better and worse _reasons_ to believe in the objects of one's vision.

I myself am rather bad at recognizing people, and not just because my vision isn't all that great. It's a more fundamental difficulty than that. I often joke that I got the beta version of face recognition software loaded onto my hard drive. So to me the inferential nature of "seeing that figure _as_ my friend John" across the room is particularly evident. It's like doing in slow motion and with less justified confidence what presumably other people do much more quickly and (given their good track records) with much more justified confidence.

Similarly, a person who is, say, learning about different kinds of wood learns to "see this as oak" and so forth gradually and can even track that process within himself, and a teacher learns to break it down and explain it to teach someone who is new to it.

This stuff is not by any means impossible to get hold of. It's just that it would be prohibitively cumbersome to think about most of it explicitly most of the time.

But those who cultivate a certain introspective tendency of mind bring that kind of thing to the fore with some frequency: "Now, what is it about that guy that reminds me of John, even though I know it can't be John?" And so forth.

Now, in the situation I'm imagining with Joe, given his background, he may have access to reasons for, say, believing in God (as I suggested in the main post) but not actually be basing his belief in God on them (as I said in a comment). In that case, he doesn't even have a tacit argument, since the basing relationship does not obtain. Rather, he believes in Christianity for more directly testimonial reasons coming from people who, he realizes (let us say), do not actually have access to more evidence than he has and are hence not really authoritative on the matter (say, his fideistic parents and pastor).

In that case, he is not _at this particular time_ basing his reasons on either what you are calling an "argumentative" reason that is sufficient or on what you are suggesting might be called a non-argumentative reason.

In contrast, you have a tacit reason, which is not impossible nor even all that difficult for you to "point" to (even if you don't think of it verbally and usually don't bother to think of it at all) for thinking the wood is fake wood--that reason lies in your sensory experiences and your memories of previous experiences with real and fake wood.

I'm not making this notion of tacit argument as deeply buried and difficult (nigh impossible) to access as you apparently think I am making it.
It's not that I thought you were making it that inaccessible, I was saying that you would have to make it that inaccessible if you want your theory to be consistent with the phenomenological data.
... you have a tacit reason, ... even if you ... don't bother to think of it at all ... for thinking the wood is fake wood.
To say that I actually infer something when I am not thinking the inference at all -- that makes no sense to me. To draw an inference is, by its very nature, an act of thought.
... he believes in Christianity for more directly testimonial reasons
I would indeed call those "reasons."
coming from people who, he realizes, do not actually have access to more evidence than he has and are hence not really authoritative on the matter
I don't grant the "hence". Their lack of argumentative evidence doesn't make their word unauthoritative. It does mean they don't personally have any authority of their own, but when they speak as conveyers of tradition they are not speaking with their own authority but with the authority of the tradition.
In that case, he is not basing his reasons on what you are suggesting might be called a non-argumentative reason.
Isn't he? Why cannot the authority of the Christian tradition be a non-argumentative reason that he is basing his belief upon?
Why cannot the authority of the Christian tradition be a non-argumentative reason that he is basing his belief upon?

Well, based upon your agreement that the other people he's relying on don't actually know any more than he does and are also taking a "just because tradition" approach, because there is a kind of regress problem of justification (I believe it because that person believes it because that person believes it) and because Joe hasn't figured out yet that the regress terminates in people who actually know what the heck they are talking about as opposed to all taking in each other's washing. (Which, I'm sorry to say, is pretty much what Mormons are doing.)

Notice that these types of regresses are terminated relatively quickly in daily life. If someone tells me that American Pharoah won the triple crown, and if he's the kind of person I consider trustworthy, I assume that he read it somewhere, written by someone who was in a pedigree that went back to someone who had actual video footage, relevant eyewitness testimony, etc.

I don't grant the "hence". Their lack of argumentative evidence doesn't make their word unauthoritative. It does mean they don't personally have any authority of their own, but when they speak as conveyers of tradition they are not speaking with their own authority but with the authority of the tradition.

Come to that, since he has "received" of that tradition, he already has the same authority that they have. If it seems thin to him and that's why he is searching for more, relying on THEIR reliance on tradition, simply and full stop, doesn't get him anywhere. There has to be (as Lydia says) recourse to someone not relying on tradition. This is, by the way, why one of the marks of the Church is "holy": in the repeating recurrence of true, obvious, outstanding saintly holiness here and there throughout history, we have recourse to a kind of witness that, together with the continuity of tradition going back to actual eye witnesses, is much more than just "taking in each other's washing."

Similarly, a person who is, say, learning about different kinds of wood learns to "see this as oak" and so forth gradually and can even track that process within himself, and a teacher learns to break it down and explain it to teach someone who is new to it.

Certainly a person studying biology can learn the process of narrowing down what something is by considering shape of the leaves, size of the leaves, the vein structure, the branching structure, the bark pattern, etc. This is obvious and conscious reasoning in order to identify.

But I am not the least but sure this is what is going on (even inchoately) with a 2-year old when you sit down and read him books in which you point to dog and cat and horse and say "dog" and "cat" and "horse", until eventually he is totally capable of identifying all sorts of dogs - even breeds you have never shown him before - as dogs, and has no trouble picking out dogs from cats, and both from horses. The process by which he conceptualizes "horse" in his intellect, is a process in a sense, but it is not an argumentative one at all, I think. At least, that's what Aristotle indicates. He calls it the process in which the active intellect abstracts from the sensible experience which he has seen / heard / etc the substantial form which constitutes the essential horsiness of "horse". And the process is drawn out bit by bit only insofar as the presenting of multiple instances of the sensible forms means that eventually, at some moment, the intellect has some "aha" moment and apprehends "horse" as such. It doesn't do so as an argument, for (when a child is just learning his earliest words) he could not have the concepts with which to formulate reasons to say this or that feature is critical.

And a biologist can have this conceptualizing event with respect to new species even during the process in which he brings his reason to bear as he is trained to do. The latter does not preclude the former. So, while he initially does need to parse through the logic tree of features, eventually he ceases to need it because (like the child who grasps dog as dog, he recognizes ash tree as ash without the logic.

I was only concerned to address the question of whether one is reasonably assenting to, say, the content of John 1, when it seems to one that one is hearing the word of God.

I have no objection to your claim that in faith, properly so called, God moves the will directly (and if He does that it wouldn't seem right to call _that_ "evidence.") But I don't see why he couldn't also work in the manner I described.

Well, Chris, perhaps I am concerned about something that you haven't been discussing here, and perhaps don't need to. But I think it does have some bearing. I think that there is an important difference between the way we adhere to "the faith", and to a proposition like "my pastor is like a prophet of old, speaking with God's inspiration". And that adherence is different even though both come from God. When God moves us to assent to the faith, we have such "assurance of things unseen" that we can and ought to rely on that assurance even in the face of seeming contradiction. If so-called evidence comes along seeming to say "no, your faith is empty because Jesus did not rise from the dead because we have found his bones" we refuse to give up the faith because the manner in which we adhere is (through God) stronger than our reliance on human evidence. But not so for the other: if at first I thought my pastor was a holy prophet - feeling a moment of inspiration about it - and I then come across evidence that he is a mountebank, I SHOULD doubt the validity of that inspirational moment. (As should Mormons doubt Joe Smith and Brigham Young when their problems are pointed out.)

I believe that God, by grace, gives us interior movements of help to locate truths that we are not (quite) capable of finding on our own. As a parent, I have learned to listen to that inner prompting for things I wouldn't see, like that (for example) a child needs special encouragement right now. And I (sometimes) act on these interior movement of inspiration. But I don't rely on them without reserve, I don't adhere to them as "gospel truth" the way I adhere to, well, the Gospel. I could make a mistake about these inspirations. And that's ok, my faith is not shaken if that turns out to be the case. Hence my assent to it correlates with that of holding an opinion, not that of unreserved belief. And, my point is that it IS INDEED epistemically inappropriate to adhere to a proposition as of _belief_ when you have only the wherewithall to support an opinion - even if part of that support is from God.

Lydia:

Joe hasn't figured out yet that the regress terminates in people who actually know what the heck they are talking about
That is, he doesn't have an argument one way or the other. Right. That's why this can't function as an argumentative reason for him. But the question is whether it can be a non-argumentative reason. If we're allowing for non-argumentative reasons at all, this counts because the apostolic witness is in fact trustworthy, and the tradition as a matter of fact has preserved that witness in a sufficiently (not infallibly) reliable way.

You seem to be implicitly granting (at least for the sake of argument assuming non-argumentative reasons can exist at all) that short testimonial chains can function as such. The length of a testimonial chain is certainly relevant to its reliability. But other things are relevant too. Some longer testimonial chains are more reliable than some shorter ones. Even a very long testimonial chain _can_ be reliable, especially if it includes texts written in the first generation, as the Christian tradition does. As a matter of fact, the Christian tradition is reliable, as you have agreed. So Joe's faith is based on an actually reliable source.

It's still no good as an argumentative reason, because he doesn't _know_ that it's reliable; at least, he doesn't know this independent of his faith, so to use that knowledge (if we call it knowledge) as a premise in his argument would be question begging.

You seem to think non-argumentative reasons would have to function just like argumentative reasons: as if they are based on propositions (effectively premises) one has to know, even if one doesn't consciously draw an inference from them. That sounds a lot like the subconsious arguments I've been trying to pin on you, it's not at all what I mean by "non-argumentative reasons." I'm talking about grounding one's belief in an actually reliable source.

The underlying issue here is internal justification, but the proposed defeator for that internal justification is Joe's discovery of a lack, an imperfection, in his manner of believing. If Joe had discovered that he lacks a reason for his belief in the sense that his belief is not grounded on an actually reliable source, then that would constitute a defeator. But all he has discovered is that he lacks an argument.

I think our fundamental disagreement is what we think one "should" do when one has (and knows one has) no argument for or against a proposition p, and has no argument for or against the reliability of whatever it is that led one to have whatever doxastic attitude one presently has toward p. Absent other considerations, you say one should change one's doxastic attitude to witholding p (if one isn't already doing that). An alternative theory would say that the default position should be to leave one's doxastic attitude unchanged until one is given an actual reason to change it. A third alternative would say that either one is permissible; there's no "should" either way, absent other considerations.

Put another way, the question is: Is intellectual prejudice ever justified, or are we always obligated to try our best to make our doxastic attitudes match the state of the evidence we have?

Consider a man's faith in the fidelity of his wife. Othello had not known Desdemona for very long when he married her. He did not have a deep knowledge of her character. He probably had some knowledge of her character, but easily too little to overcome the evidence he was presented with. If he had nevertheless retained his faith in her, would he have been unjustified? I'm inclined to think not. But what I am contending here is something weaker. Suppose the evidence he had against her only exactly counterbalanced any internalistic reason he had in her favor, effectively putting him in the same position as if he had no argument one way or the other. Was he obligated to stop believing her to be faithful to him? Would an intellectual prejudice in her favor have been somehow "wrong"?

If you say yes, how can you possibly _know_ that?

If we're allowing for non-argumentative reasons at all, this counts because the apostolic witness is in fact trustworthy, and the tradition as a matter of fact has preserved that witness in a sufficiently (not infallibly) reliable way.

That is a strongly externalist argument, and I don't grant that mere actual reliability is sufficient for justification. I'm an internalist.

You seem to be implicitly granting (at least for the sake of argument assuming non-argumentative reasons can exist at all) that short testimonial chains can function as such.

No, not in a purely externalist fashion. I think we have a pretty good idea *that* the sources of our belief that American Pharoah won the Triple Crown actually (at the end of the chain) know what they are talking about.

but the proposed defeator for that internal justification is Joe's discovery of a lack, an imperfection, in his manner of believing. If Joe had discovered that he lacks a reason for his belief in the sense that his belief is not grounded on an actually reliable source, then that would constitute a defeator. But all he has discovered is that he lacks an argument.

Well, being an internalist, I generally try to avoid defeater talk altogether. But if one is going to use such language, then you seem to be thinking that the only kinds of defeaters are rebutting defeaters. Generally externalists themselves also allow what are called undercutting defeaters--that is, defeaters which remove the force of a reason one had previously had. The IEP article also has a category of "no reason" defeaters, though I've generally seen these subsumed under undercutting defeaters. See here:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/ep-defea/#SH6a

He did not have a deep knowledge of her character. He probably had some knowledge of her character, but easily too little to overcome the evidence he was presented with.

Ah, now we can argue about literature. :-)

I completely disagree. I think Iago's claims were bizarre and contrived and should have immediately invited doubt about Iago's own honesty. At a minimum, the proper response would have been to discuss Iago's claims openly with both Desdamona and Cassio (perhaps separately) and note their responses. Desdamona herself has an extremely credible manner (which is evidentially relevant), and Cassio is open to the point of being almost naive. And Othello _had_ known Cassio for a long time, which would have given him evidence against Iago's claims.

I think good "prejudices" are always something better than mere prejudices. They are based upon real evidence.

Tony:

"my pastor is like a prophet of old, speaking with God's inspiration".

I have not suggested any such thing. Though he speak with never so much unction, he is certainly not inspired. The only similarity between him and the prophets of old lies solely in the content of the word proclaimed. It is inspired, "God-breathed," whether I hear it as such or not. It is inspired when I read it on my own. It is inspired when proclaimed by a saint. It is inspired when proclaimed by a mountebank, with or without unction or the appearance thereof. The "hearing as" as it occurred in my example involved only hearing the word as divine, not the messenger as inspired or even anointed. The powerful manner in which he preached was only the occasion for my hearing it as the word of God. Neither his manner of preaching nor his presumed saintliness or even moral decency was taken as a basis for hearing it as such.

In Reformed theology, Holy Scripture, because it is the word of God, has a divine character that can be recognized. We say that Scripture is "self-attesting." The ability to recognize the divine character of the word is not in us naturally, but we apprehend it because of the work of Holy Spirit. The phrase "internal testimony" comes from John Calvin. Doubtless as a Roman Catholic you disagree with this. If you wish me to make the theological case for the Reformed position, I could have a go, but we'd need to really get into the exegetical weeds a bit if we want to usefully engage the issue.

As for the differences bewteen opinion and faith, properly so called: I have been arguing that it is reasonable to accept the truths of the Christian religion AT LEAST as justified opinion. I also believe that having faith requires an absolute and unreserved trust in what God says. Because he's God. To do less would be to treat God as something less than God. The difficulty is that part of what is at issue is what, if anything, has God said. As soon as I know God has said it I am obligated to believe it no matter how unreasonable it seems to be. But how am I to know what constitutes divine revelation? You will point me to the church, and on one level I will agree. I have been arguing for the reasonableness of resting on the consensus fidelium as on a pillar. For has not God made his church a pillar of truth, on which we ought to lean? He has. But to say that is not to say the church is God. The church is NOT God, and we ought not trust the church's word with the same absolute trust that we must give to God's word. So if I am to believe, with the sort of absolute faith you describe, the content of the church's claims about what constitutes divine revelation, I require weightier testimony than hers.

Lydia, I bow to your superior knowledge of Shakespeare, but it doesn't get you off the hook of my question. If Othello doesn't fit the bill, it's easy to imagine a situation that would: If a man recently married without having known his wife for a long time were presented with objective evidence of his wife's unfaithfulness, exactly counterbalancing whatever argumentative reasons he has in her favor, is he wrong to continue to believe her faithful? Must he suspend judgment? and how do you know that?

It's clear enough that you are an internalist and I an externalist. I think I've also made it clear that your attempts to show that Joe is unjustified presuppose internalism. From an externalist perspective they show no such thing. So unless you can independently demonstrate the truth of internalism, they are unsuccessful.

you seem to be thinking that the only kinds of defeaters are rebutting defeaters.
I really don't know what gives you that idea. I said, "If Joe had discovered that ... his belief is not grounded on an actually reliable source, then that would constitute a defeater." That is exactly what is going on in the example of an undercutting defeater in the article you linked. The source of his belief, his visual sense, is (he learns) not actually a reliable source, in the given circumstances, for his belief that the widgets are red.

good "prejudices" are always something better than mere prejudices. They are based upon real evidence.
Entirely? Then why call them prejudices? Don't you mean, "some things that people think are prejudices are really not prejudices at all." Which may well be true, but it leaves standing my claim that you adhere to the Enlightenment prejudice against prejudice.

I forgot to address no-argument defeaters.

Quoting from the IEP article you linked:

A no-reason defeater is a reason for supposing that it’s no longer reasonable to believe p given that (a) one has no reason for believing p and (b) the belief that p is the sort of belief that it’s reasonable to hold only if one has evidence for p (Bergmann, 1997a, pp. 102-103).

(b) has not been satisfied in Joe's case.

Evidentialism can be described as the belief that (b) is globally satisfied. But that itself needs an argument, otherwise evidentialism is hoist by it own petard.

Since I am a foundationalist, I cannot believe that b is globally satisfied. (That's why I stuck in some qualifiers to that effect in the main post.)

But I do think the existence of the Christian God satisfies it. After all, Christianity is highly contentful. It even includes historical propositions about the life and death of Jesus, as well as relatively complex theological propositions such as that our sins are forgiven through believing on Jesus, that Jesus is God, etc.

This whole religious system, which many people in the history of mankind cannot even have ever heard of, is not even a good prima facie candidate for something that can justifiably be believed _without evidence_.

I have not suggested any such thing. Though he speak with never so much unction, he is certainly not inspired.

I disagree: to prophecy because God has given you to prophecy is, precisely to be inspired. To speak because He has breathed something of His own into you.

And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers,

The gift of prophecy was not limited to the OT.

Or, consider an event in the Bible, not from the perspective of it being "in" the Bible, but from the perspective of the actors. This Sunday in church our reading takes Mary off in haste into the hill country, goes to her cousin, the baby leaps in his mother's womb, and Elizabeth

was filled with the Holy Spirit. And she cried out with a loud voice and said, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!…

Elizabeth perceived an astounding truth, one for which the obvious evidence was totally insufficient, but God moved her interiorly to see that truth. And she accepted it, and spoke it. Her speaking it was as inspired as her receiving it, and comes to us as the inspired Word of God. But when she spoke those words, she did not know that they would become part of the Bible. She did not know that they were Scripture. All she knew was that she had a flash of enlightening perception, one that called for expressing out loud. As did the prophets.

But the question is whether it can be a non-argumentative reason.....non-argumentative reasons would have to function just like argumentative reasons: as if they are based on propositions (effectively premises) one has to know, even if one doesn't consciously draw an inference from them. That sounds a lot like the subconsious arguments I've been trying to pin on you, it's not at all what I mean by "non-argumentative reasons." I'm talking about grounding one's belief in an actually reliable source.

I wish, Christopher, that you had chosen language other than "non-argumentative reason". Do you mean something like "non-argumentative cause of assent" or non-argumentative basis of assent", or maybe "non-argumnentative perception of the truth"? Since "reason" has such a strong connotation of "argued basis" for assent, I find it obscuring to try to use "reason" after "non-argumentative.

In any case: we all agree that faith comes from God. Is the dispute on whether the act of faith is (for want of better language) epistemologically justified versus ontologically justified? By the latter I mean something along the lines of "since God made it to BE so, it is good that it be so," that kind of 'justified.'

If my (i.e. Josef Pieper's) definition of faith above is valid, then by definition faith goes beyond what you have FULL epistemic justification for on your own cognition of the truth. For if you have FULL epistemic justification, it is therefore "seen", rather than "assurance of things unseen". But Christian faith is, first, adherence to a PERSON (pr Persons) before it is belief in propositions.

"Vague sense of" seems to be functioning as a question-begging pejorative here. His parents believe on the basis of tradition.
Their lack of argumentative evidence doesn't make their word unauthoritative. It does mean they don't personally have any authority of their own, but when they speak as conveyers of tradition they are not speaking with their own authority but with the authority of the tradition.
Why cannot the authority of the Christian tradition be a non-argumentative reason that he is basing his belief upon?

Can I just say, it is refreshing to see a Calvinist defend tradition so firmly. Thanks, I don't get to see that very often. :-)

You're welcome.

I agree that the gift of prophecy was not limited to the OT, and I agree that Elizabeth prophesied in the same way as Isaiah prophesied. At least that sure looks like what Luke is saying when he says she was "filled with the Spirit and spoke ...". And if there be any doubt, the case of Agabus is even more clear (Acts 21.11). But there is a difference between this and an ordinary preacher who proclaims the Scripture. The preacher is fallible. Even if he doesn't expound but only reads, he can misread, he can read from an inaccurate translation, etc. Minor errors to be sure, but they are possible. By contrast, when the Spirit inspires prophecy of the "thus saith the Lord" sort, the result is infallible.

Now, there's a question about whether the word "prophecy" only refers to the infallible proclamation of this kind, or whether ordinary preaching can also be regarded as a kind of prophecy. Certainly if one is preaching Scripture, one is proclaiming the word of God, and that makes it sufficiently similar to what the prophets of old did that the word 'prophecy' may be appropriate. And the word is used this way in the Reformed tradition. But even though the word can cover both things, the activity of an ordinary preacher, no matter how powerful his manner of speaking, is different from the activity of those prophets of the Old and New Testament who were inspired to speak infallibly.

This thread of the conversation sprang from your saying,

there is an important difference between the way we adhere to "the faith", and to a proposition like "my pastor is like a prophet of old, speaking with God's inspiration"
But that proposition is not the proposition in question. The proposition in question is "this word (the prologue of John's gospel) is the word of God." The belief in that proposition is not based on a belief about the proclaimer or the manner of his proclaiming. It concerns only the content of the proclamation. If I know that the content of his proclamation is God's word, I may conclude that his act of proclaiming it is a sort of prophecy. But that would be the result of argument. The unargued premise without which I could not call his activity prophecy is my belief that the content preached, John 1, is the word of God, which I know because I apprehend its divine character. (My apprehending happened at a certain moment in my experience, but that which I apprehended was not a proposition about an event in my lifetime).
Since "reason" has such a strong connotation of "argued basis" for assent, I find it obscuring to try to use "reason" after "non-argumentative."
Yes, I see this. Which is why I originally offered the alternative. But Lydia picked up on the "argumentative reason" language, so that was what I went with. I'm happy to stick with "basis" or "ground" instead of "reason". But I felt some inclination to buck against the English language, which I think has been corrupted by Cartesian-Lockean epistemology. Language is an expression of culture, and modern philosophy has had its effect on English-speaking culture. English, (in contrast to, say, Latin) wants to restrict 'reason' to argument, but at the same time wants to say that to believe without reason is unreasonable. Suppose I believe something self-evident. Is my belief "without reason"? One might say "yes, and that's OK" but one might also want to say, "No, your belief is not 'without reason', the thing is reasonable in itself, you just don't need an argument for it." Believing something self-evident is certainly not believing sine ratione.

Is the dispute on whether the act of faith is (for want of better language) epistemologically justified versus ontologically justified?

The dispute is over whether a Christian who believes without argument (and knows that that's what he's doing) is ipso facto being unreasonable.

I'm happy to stick with "basis" or "ground" instead of "reason".

And, if I am following you, you are saying that one such ground is tradition. Is that right? Are there other grounds besides that?

But there is a difference between this and an ordinary preacher who proclaims the Scripture. The preacher is fallible.

Sorry, I guess my example was ambiguous. I meant, not his repeating Scripture, but specifically his talking about what will happen...and then they occur, things which were not readily predictable.

Ah. I misunderstood. I though you were responding to my example of hearing John 1 as God's word when my pastor powerfully proclaimed it. You were instead making your own example. On rereading your comment, I'm still not entirely sure what your example is trying to accomplish.

one such ground is tradition. Is that right? Are there other grounds besides that?
Yes. Many others, one of which is: the apparently divine character of Scripture is a rational ground for my belief that it is God's word, if in fact I am enabled actually to apprehend its divine character, and am not simply "seeing things". Another is: the phenomenological character of sensation provides non-argumentative grounds for (a) ordinary beliefs about the objects in the room with me, and (b) the belief that I am having a sense experience of such and such character. Another: the character of my apparent memories is grounds for my beliefs about things I experienced in the past and my belief that I remember them and my belief that I seem to remember them. Another: I stop and ask someone to direct me to the nearest gas station. He does so, and I take him at his word. Although I _could_, if I wished, construct a decent argument (people don't usually lie without motive, he probably doesn't have a motive to lie, therefore, etc.) I typically don't do that. I just take him at his word without giving it a second thought. As children we are by nature credulous. We learn to restrict our credulity in certain topics and with certain people. But where there is no reason not to be credulous, we still take people at their word.

In short, everything our discursive intellect receives that it did not produce itself, if it receives it from a reliable source (whether that source is within ourselves or without), that reliable source grounds the belief.

Lydia,

Since I am a foundationalist, I cannot believe that b is globally satisfied.
Noted. To assume b is globally satisfied would be begging the question. By the same token, to assume b is globally satisfied unless it's self-evident or immediately given in experience is no less question-begging.

Different foundationalists would characterize properly foundational beliefs differently, but no foundationalist will put the Christian religion in the foudation. Someone who thinks belief in the Christian religion is "properly basic" is not a foundationalist in any non-misleading sense of the term. A religious system, especially one with historical content, is not the sort of thing that could be a candidate for part of a foundationalist's foundation. But are such "foundational" beliefs the only beliefs it could be reasonable to (knowingly) hold without evidence? To assert that they are is just to assert that foundationalism is true. In saying,

Christianity is highly contentful. ... not even a good prima facie candidate for something that can justifiably be believed _without evidence_,
you are just presupposing foundationalism, you haven't shown that it is true. And more to the point, Joe hasn't been shown that it is true, and so he lacks a defeater, since he hasn't been shown that either its failure to meet foundationalist criteria or anything else about it renders Christianity the sort of thing one can't reasonably believe without argument.

Also Joe used to be justified in believing Christianity without argument. If Joe is obligated to drop his belief after his discovery that he lacks a reason for it, there has to be something about what he has discovered that engenders that obligation in him. What is that? A hard-core evidentialist has no problem identifying it: Believing in the black-box manner is never justified. We don't blame small children for believing in that way, they aren't culpable, but neither are their beliefs justified. So when Joe discovers that his manner-of-believing is inherently non-justified, he has an obligation to drop his belief. So says the hard-core evidentialist. But to discover, "I have hitherto been believing in a sub-optimal, but justified manner," that kind of discovery doesn't oblige him to drop his belief.

Undermining defeaters work by identifying some defect in the belief, a defect sufficient to render continued belief unjustified. For instance, in the case of the widgets, the viewer learns that conditions are such that his belief that the widgets are red is, and always was, unwarranted. And when he learns this it becomes also internally unjustified. Continuing to believe what you know to be unwarranted is unjustified. But Joe has no reason to think his belief was/is unwarranted, or in any other way defective except with a defect of immaturity, which is not sufficient to render his continued belief unjustified.

Lydia,

Ed Feser has a post up on his blog where he cites and discusses your and other's analyses of whether Islam worships the same God as Christianity.

The Chicken

Yeah, I'm aware of that and have been following it. So far, I'm staying out of any direct involvement, both because I'm having a grand time writing a completely unrelated professional, technical article, and because I don't need the drama in my life of trying to debate that particular interlocutor.

I may, however, get over those feelings after my technical article has been drafted, say, "Oh, what the heck!" and get scrappy.

Meanwhile, if you're interested in further interaction and comments (fortunately without drama), I think the discussion on two or three posts Maverick Philosopher on this subject, in which I have participated extensively, has been of high quality.

Lydia, just curious: Have your read any skeptical/atheist lit by, say, e.g., Kai Nielsen, Ron Hepburn, Antony Flew, Anthony O'Hear, C.B. Martin, or Wallace Matson (and/or, more recently, Richard Carrier, as well, for that matter)? Also, Canadian philosopher Malcolm Murray has an interesting new book out, The Atheist's Primer, that contains some interesting discussions. Again, merely curious. Hope you & Tim are doing OK. Best wishes.

Nah, I never read any atheists. I'm scared of them./sarc

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