In discussion about the existence of God, atheists often demand to see the evidence for God, and, in response, some theists (with some familiarity with the “reformed epistemology” of theists like Alston, Plantinga, etc.) will ask why evidence is needed in order for the belief to be rational\/reasonable.<\/p>\n
Exactly this has been going on in the comments on my final installment of the God Delusion book club.<\/a><\/p>\n If you are scratching your head over this (and some of you clearly are) here is a very brief explanation.<\/p>\n One popular sort of theory of knowledge (knowledge = justified true belief) says that:<\/p>\n a knows that P if and only if: What does “justified” mean? Well, good evidence would provide justification – you infer the belief from this evidence. But a regress threatens. To know A, I infer it from B, but to know B I must infer it from C, ad infinitum. But then no belief will be justified. Global scepticism looms.<\/p>\n One way out of the regress is to either (i) understand “justified” as including non-inferential forms of justification, or (ii) just drop the justification condition and replace it with something else.<\/p>\n Here is an example of the second strategy:<\/p>\n a knows that P iff: This is a simple RELIABILIST theory of knowledge.<\/p>\n Suppose your senses are reliable mechanisms for producing true beliefs<\/span>. If there’s an orange on the table in front of you, your eyes etc. will cause you to believe there’s an orange there. Remove the orange, and that will cause you to stop believing there’s an orange there. Because your senses are fairly reliable belief-producing mechanisms, your beliefs “track the truth” in a fairly reliable way.<\/p>\n If that is the case, then you can be a knower. You can know there’s an orange on the table in front of you. You can know this, despite not inferring<\/span> that the orange is there from evidence. You simply, directly, know. Non-inferentially. And, indeed, without justification<\/span> (unless you want to redefine justification so that being in this situation counts as “being justified”).<\/p>\n Moreover, add some philosophers, it is pretty reasonable<\/span> for you to believe there is an orange there if that is how it directly seems to you.<\/p>\n So you can have a belief, unsupported by any inference, unjustified, yet nevertheless qualifying as both reasonable and (if the reliable mechanism is doing its stuff) knowledge.<\/p>\n Of course, this theory of knowledge is manna from heaven to a theist. They can now suggest they may have a special sense – a God-sensing mechanism (“sensus divinitatis”) that is functioning reliably – which accounts for why it just seems to them that God exists. If there is such a mechanism, and it is producing their belief, then (i) it’s reasonable<\/span> for them to believe God exists, and (ii) they know<\/span> God exists, despite not possessing any evidence or justification.<\/p>\n This is where Kyle is coming from, I take it. Ask a theist what their evidence for God is, and they can say – “I have no evidence. I just know<\/span> he does”. And, if reliabilism is correct, it could be true: they do<\/span> “just know”. In the same way that you can “just know” there’s an orange on the table.<\/p>\n Personally, I quite like reliabilism and such “externalist” theories of knowledge (“externalist” means you don’t need to know that the conditions for your knowing obtain – you can know without knowing you know).<\/p>\n However, I am, predictably, entirely unconvinced by theistic attempts to use reliabilism to show that their belief in God is reasonable, and, if it’s acquired by a reliable sensus divinitatis, knowledge. There are some pretty obvious problems with it (obvious even to many theists, in fact: they certainly don’t all go for this stuff).<\/p>\n We did spend quite a lot of time on this stuff a while ago. See here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In discussion about the existence of God, atheists often demand to see the evidence for God, and, in response, some theists (with some familiarity with the “reformed epistemology” of theists like Alston, Plantinga, etc.) will ask why evidence is needed in order for the belief to be rational\/reasonable. Exactly this has been going on in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religious-experience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725","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=725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
(i) a believes P
(ii) P is true
(iii) a is justified in believing P<\/p>\n
(i) a believes that P
(ii) P is true
(iii) a’s belief that P is produced by the state of affairs P via a reliable mechanism<\/p>\n