There are various ways to respond to the argument set out in my previous blog, some of which have already been mentioned.<\/p>\n
I suspect the most obvious objection (already touched on) is this. If we take<\/p>\n
(ii) there is a (good) God<\/p>\n
to provide grounds for<\/p>\n
(i) our senses are a reliable guide to reality,<\/p>\n
what our senses then strongly confirm is that (ii) is false (the problem of evil). Therefore, it is far more reasonable to start with (i) than (ii). You might still call (i) a faith position, but it does not involve nearly as much faith as (ii).<\/p>\n
In addition, as has also been mentioned, it is controversial whether (i) must be accepted on “faith”. Arguably, there are good grounds for accepting it over, say, the evil demon hypothesis. For example, we might suggest this: that it is a real world we experience rather than an illusion provides the best explanation<\/span> of what we experience; therefore it is more likely to be true. The two hypotheses (a real world vs. a demon-conjured illusory world) may be equally consistent<\/span> with what we experience; it doesn’t follow that they are equally probable<\/span> (this is an application of inference to the best explanation<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are various ways to respond to the argument set out in my previous blog, some of which have already been mentioned. I suspect the most obvious objection (already touched on) is this. If we take (ii) there is a (good) God to provide grounds for (i) our senses are a reliable guide to reality, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism-a-faith-position"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1041\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}