• Log In

The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

A Philosophy Podcast and Philosophy Blog

Subscribe on Android Spotify Google Podcasts audible patreon
  • Home
  • Podcast
    • PEL Network Episodes
    • Publicly Available PEL Episodes
    • Paywalled and Ad-Free Episodes
    • PEL Episodes by Topic
    • Nightcap
    • (sub)Text
    • Pretty Much Pop
    • Nakedly Examined Music
    • Phi Fic Podcast
    • Combat & Classics
    • Constellary Tales
  • Blog
  • About
    • PEL FAQ
    • Meet PEL
    • About Pretty Much Pop
    • Nakedly Examined Music
    • Meet Phi Fic
    • Listener Feedback
    • Links
  • Join
    • Become a Citizen
    • Join Our Mailing List
    • Log In
  • Donate
  • Store
    • Episodes
    • Swag
    • Everything Else
    • Cart
    • Checkout
    • My Account
  • Contact
  • Mailing List

Topic for #129: Is Religious Faith Rational?

December 13, 2015 by Mark Linsenmayer 6 Comments

Our long-ago episode 43 on arguments for the existence of God left us with a question: If believers aren't swayed or even much interested in the failure of these classical arguments, then what does motivate them? Does being "reasonable" epistemically always mean that you look at the available evidence (like these arguments), and believe in accordance with that? If Kant is right that religious claims (at least some of them) don't lie within the empirical realm and so can't be evaluated by reference to scientific evidence, then what justification could one have for being religious? We previously explored William James's pragmatic response to this question (if we can't know either way, then hold whatever belief most improves life) but wanted to get some different perspectives.

On 11/22/15, Mark and Wes held what was planned as a bonus episode, i.e., a purposeful vacation for Seth and Dylan, and instead brought on two representatives from other podcasts:

  • Nathan Gilmour is an English (and philosophy and history) professor who hosts the Christian Humanist podcast, which is a three-way discussion like PEL, sometimes covering things they all read (try ep. 152 on Kant's "What Is Enlightenment?,") sometimes just pulling out their scholarly knowledge to address some general topic (I brought up during our discussion their ep. 70 on epistemology), and sometimes discussing a movie or something else (I enjoyed ep. 158 on Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Nathan's accent and denomination may scream southern evangelical, but his scholarly chops and good-natured humor belie any stereotype you may have in mind.
  • Rob Dyer is senior pastor at a liberal Protestant church and is producer/engineer for the God Complex Radio podcast (where I was a guest a while back). God Complex is a talk show mainly aimed at clergy where two hosts interview authors of various books (at one point in the current episode Rob refers to Diana Butler Bass who was on their show). Rob's a cheery, gregarious guy with the no-nonsense mind (and past profession) of an engineer.

So that makes two (fairly liberal) theists and two agnostic/atheist types, and to prepare we read the final chapter of the 1999 collection Faith and Reason (Oxford Readers), edited by Paul Helm, which provided a variety of concise arguments from different perspectives about reason and belief in God in the form of a dozen short (2–9 page) essays or excerpts:

    • Antony Flew, "The Presumption of Atheism" (1976). Read it online. Flew was a famous atheist, author of the widely read essay “Theology and Falsification” (1950), who late in his life (he died in 2010) actually converted to deism and remains a disputed propaganda item. The essay we read claimed that just as in a court of law the burden of proof is on the accuser, in any attempt to determine the existence of something, that burden is on the one arguing for the existence of that thing. So just because we can't know whether the flying spaghetti monster is real, we don't need to be agnostics: we assume something doesn't exist unless we have warrant to do otherwise.
    • Norwood Russell Hanson, “The Agnostic’s Dilemma” (1971). (You can read the first two pages online here and the last ones here, which is enough to get the idea.) Hanson can be read as elaborating on Flew's picture. Hanson describes scientific explanation and logical investigation as different regarding negative existentials: In science, to prove something (like an egg-laying bat) exists, you need only produce one instance of it; to prove that no egg-laying bats exist, you just look as far and wide as you can and by induction, if you don't find it, you say there isn't one, just as in science, to prove a law, i.e., a positive universal claim, you look at all instances you can where the law should apply, and if no violations are found, then you affirm the law... provisionally, always open to a disconfirming case, but this is far from agnosticism. The agnostic starts from a scientific position where he thinks that some proof COULD establish God (His appearance before us publicly), yet when no such proof arises, he inconsistently slips to thinking like a logician and says "well, you can't 100% prove the lack of existence of something, so I must forever remain perfectly neutral."
    • Steven Cahn, "The Irrelevance of Proof to Religion" (1969). Read the essay online here, starting on p. 2. Cahn argues that believers have no interest in proofs for the existence of God because they afford no means of distinguishing good from evil, i.e., God's Will (see our episode on the Euthyphro for a variation on this: IS does not imply OUGHT). Believers either have a "self-validating" experience that convinces them of something about God's will for them, or they may accept someone else's self-validating experience, e.g., by buying into a religious tradition. Cahn's position had deep resonance for both of our guests.
    • Alvin Plantinga, “Is Belief in God Properly Basic?” (1981 article in Nous). Read the essay online. Plantinga has been highly influential, and this was probably the most complex of the papers we read. He claims that there are plenty of propositions such as "other minds exist" and "material objects exist" that we don't have evidence for, exactly, but rather we take these as basic. Strictly speaking (think back to Descartes), we only have these sensations, and yet we assume as basic the belief that these appearances in general correspond to things in the world. Comparably, Plantinga thinks that it is natural for people to have the reaction, for example, when seeing an eye designed to see or the vast night sky to express these as actions of God. Maybe you don't interpret those phenomena that way, but we only have to pay attention to our own phenomenology in establishing what we take to be basic.
    • Merold Westphal, "Sin and Reason" (1990, from his essay "On Taking St. Paul Seriously: Sin as an Epistemological Category") throws down the Calvinist gauntlet that expresses a common post-modern tack among arguers for religion: original sin warps our ability to reason, to see truth in religious matters, and so far from everyone having an underlying intuition of God, we are prone to error until (and even when) we accept God as our guide. The upshot for argumentation is that everyone is biased, that there's nothing in human instinct or raw reasoning power that we can all refer to to resolve theological disputes.
    • Basil Mitchell “Faith and Criticism” (1994). Mitchell considers W.K. Clifford's principle “It is wrong, always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence” and, like Plantinga, considers how our other everyday judgments would fare against that strict criterion. Drawing on inspiration from John Henry Newman, Mitchell instead tries to give some observations about how reasoning actually works: Much of reasoning is tacit and informal, the accumulation of probabilities. Estimating the force of evidence is always influenced by antecedent assumptions (this is the hermeneutic circle, which you can hear us talk about in discussing Gadamer and then in a specifically religious context about Ricoeur). Finally, we need stability in these assumptions over time, and don't just change our whole world-view in light of new evidence. He compares this to paradigms in science that persist and just consider such new evidence one of the problems that the paradigm has to deal with (listen to us talk about Thomas Kuhn on scientific paradigms).
    • Peter van Inwagen, "Clifford's Principle" (1994). This is part of his longer essay "Quam Dilecta" that you can read online here). Continuing to bash Clifford, van Inwagen says that "evidence" that could make religious belief rational can include "'insight' or some other incommunicable event." In other words, scientific evidence must be public, but aren't there many things we believe (that someone loves us, for instance) that rely at least in part on insights that can't be confirmed in this way?
    • William Alston "Experience in Religious Belief" (1991). Read a summary online here. Alston explicitly considers mystical experience, which sounds like one of the kinds of things that van Inwagen and Cahn might be referring to by "insight" and "self-validating experience." Skeptics easily dismiss these by pointing out that nearly all the time, a mystic has his own current beliefs confirmed: Christians see Jesus in such experiences, while Hindus see Krishna or what have you. Alston defends mysticism against such attacks on hermeneutic grounds. Yes, he admits, by itself, such an indescribable experience couldn't serve to found a religion or otherwise fix religious belief, and in fact, we need prior beliefs to interpret such experiences. In a move similar to Plantinga's, Alston claims that the various experiences and prior beliefs support each other, combining to create certainty and justification (as opposed to being just a vicious circle, steeped in fundamental error).
    • Robert M. Adams, "The Sin of Unbelief" (1987) hit on another key element of this self-reinforcing circle of belief, which is that once you believe, then you believe that God has spoken to you. If you then subsequently doubt, you're not just changing your mind about an alleged matter of fact, but you're personally betraying God, and betraying that little voice in your head that will always remain once you've "hear the call." This "sin" isn't something that Adams can accuse non-believers of (he wouldn't presume to get in their heads), but for the believer, "faith" doesn't primarily mean unquestioningly assenting to a proposition of alleged fact, but it means having faith in someone, a personal God, much as you'd have faith in your spouse, in which case (as Nathan expressed it) Flew's directive (in his 1950 paper) that you be able to produce some evidence that, if it showed, would prove that there is no God (or that God is not good), is positively obscene: You don't, for instance, in entering into a marriage, contemplate exactly what would subsequently constitute grounds for divorce. As with Westphal's article, this defensive move by religion can really be an impediment to thinking that any rational discourse between believers and unbelievers can be possible: The best we seemingly can do is agree to disagree.
    • We read two articles by Richard Swinburne, "The Voluntariness of Faith" (1981) and “The World and Its Order” (1996). The former discussed pragmatic religiosity, where we start by doing religious deeds, i.e., acting as if we believed, and then tend to slip over time into actual belief, thus making this kind of faith start with voluntary action, whereas you can't just straightforwardly will that you believe something in most cases. The latter was from the book Is There a God?, which I read some of and enjoyed for our New Atheists episode, but was rather beside the point for our discussion, as it pretty much just asserted how well some of the classic arguments (like that from design) actually work... in which case, being religious would of course be rational without the need for all of this further discussion.
    • Finally, Paul Helm, the editor, chimed in with a new, short piece, "Faith and Merit," seemingly to point out the contradiction between Swinburne's two pieces just mentioned: If faith is more impressive because you have to trick yourself into it through voluntarily willing some action from which belief with then tend to follow, then arguing as Swinburne does that belief in God is reasonable on ordinary, evidential grounds amounts to denying the reader the ability to exert faith in this more difficult but more virtuous way. None of us were much impressed by this argument, as it seemed to twist what we'd read by Swinburne.

Other sources that we reviewed before the discussion were the Stanford Encyclopedia article on the epistemology of religion (by Peter Forrest), and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on religious epistemology (by Kelly James Clark), which cover much of the same ground as the above in pitting evidentialism (the claim that justified belief requires evidence) and fideism (the position that faith is justified without evidence, or alternately that faith doesn't need to be reasonable).

Buy the collection containing all these essays.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Filed Under: Featured Article, General Announcements Tagged With: Alvin Plantinga, Antony Flew, atheism, Christian Humanist, faith and reason, God Complex, philosophy of religion

Comments

  1. Adam says

    December 16, 2015 at 10:32 am

    First off, you are all eloquent speakers, and vastly more knowledgeable than I, who was trained in science, could ever be in philosophy. That said, this particular conversation irritated me greatly. As someone who was a strong agnostic, and who used a rational, logical strategy to have Faith, I was bothered by your opening arguments. They did not perform what I consider the most important clarification of this discussion, which is defining what Faith is. Discussing the assumption of theism vs atheism, for instance, is ancillary to the assumption that everyone in the group sees Faith similarly. I would ask the group to consider looking at Faith directly, and forming a consensus of what exactly it is, before talking about its rationality. I have a feeling that understanding how each of you defines Faith will be far more interesting than the rationality of how Faith is focused. The link that follows is how I resolved this issue. http://faithistmanifesto.blogspot.com/

    Reply
    • Mark Linsenmayer says

      December 16, 2015 at 12:09 pm

      Hi, Adam,

      Thanks for your thoughts and your link. We address in part 2 the question of whether faith is a choice or not.

      If I’m remembering correctly, I addressed in this part the objection that we got to our previous “Is there a God?” that corresponds to this: Shouldn’t we have to define what God is before evaluating whether He exists or not?

      So I’ll answer this the same way: No. Coming up with a precise definition without merely stipulating something is hard: it’s the result of philosophical inquiry rather than a starting point. As always, we tried to focus in our discussion on what the readings had to say about it, so I think the initial definition we arrived at pretty quickly here is “belief without evidence,” but then of course that leads to “what is evidence?” and maybe “what is belief?” and we chased at least the first of these two questions for a while.

      So, yes, it’s counter-intuitive, but defining your terms is not the best way to start a philosophical discussion.

      I’d recommend our Schleiermacher episode for a picture of faith that does not involve accepting allegedly factual but unprovable claims that potentially conflict with science, and our William James “Will to Believe” episode that I think reflects pretty well a variant in the position you outline in your link.

      Reply
      • Adam says

        December 16, 2015 at 1:17 pm

        Thanks. I will check out that episode.

        Reply
  2. Brett Chase (aka - Chen Bu Lei) says

    December 16, 2015 at 7:01 pm

    I am a cross-over listener from the Christian Humanist podcast. (Also a Madison native; graduate of Madison East and UW-Madison, though now living in Seattle). Listening to this conversation was a lot of fun, and I really dig the exchanges between Mark, Wes, Nathan, and Rob. The C.H. Podcast has taught me all I know about philosophy, and the four of you kept it at a level that allowed me to track along and stay engaged. Thank you!

    Also, I kept thinking to myself that for Christians, Jesus of Nazareth is the “empirical entity” for God’s existence. I.e., God physically appeared in our universe in the incarnation of God the Son. Also, Christianity maintains that Jesus will return to Earth again sometime in the future – yet another “empirical entity.” When he does, St. Paul tells us that his second coming will convince 100% of all humanity that he is God in human flesh. Just sayin. That is probably more theological than philosophical, Anyway, for that its worth. Thanks again to the PEL podcast for the great conversation!

    Reply
  3. Roy says

    December 20, 2015 at 2:27 am

    I have been listening to you and the History of Philosophy without any gaps and a number of pertinent shows from other Podcasts like In Our Time. .When I look at the endless successions of Gods and proclaimed enlightened prophets and the fact that there are so many different and contradictory understandings of what the nature of god is within each of the current major religions, I just can not get my head around the assertion that has been made on several episodes the Proposition that God Exists is not the one that has burden of proof at this point.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Episode 129: Is Faith Rational? (Part One) | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    December 14, 2015 at 7:00 am

    […] In this half, we focus on Flew, who compares the situation to a court of law, where we presume innocence; likewise, we should presume atheism. Cahn tells us why believers don't care about proofs for the existence of God. Hanson thinks we would all accept as proof of God if He appeared before us publicly, which means we treat His existence as an empirical proposition and should't remain agnostic any more than we suspend judgment about never-observed physical phenomena like egg-laying bats. Westphall argues that original sin means that there is no "natural light of reason" that would allow us to objectively determine without revelation anything out religious matters. For a breakdown of each of the twelve(!) readings that we covered, read the topic announcement. […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Citizenship has its Benefits

Become a PEL Citizen
Become a PEL Citizen, and get access to all paywalled episodes, early and ad-free, including exclusive Part 2's for episodes starting September 2020; our after-show Nightcap, where the guys respond to listener email and chat more causally; a community of fellow learners, and more.

Rate and Review

Nightcap

Listen to Nightcap
On Nightcap, listen to the guys respond to listener email and chat more casually about their lives, the making of the show, current events and politics, and anything else that happens to come up.

Subscribe to Email Updates

Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.

Support PEL

Buy stuff through Amazon and send a few shekels our way at no extra cost to you.

Tweets by PartiallyExLife

Recent Comments

  • Chris Hall on And now for something completely serious
  • dmf on Ep. 293: Donna Haraway on Feminist Science (Part One)
  • PvI#31: Signs, Signs, Ubiquitous Signs w/ Brooke Breit on Ep. 290: Susanne Langer on Our Symbol-Making Nature (Part One)
  • Seth Paskin on Ep. 278: Derrick Bell on the Dynamics of Racism (Part One for Supporters)
  • Eli Eichner on Ep. 278: Derrick Bell on the Dynamics of Racism (Part One for Supporters)

About The Partially Examined Life

The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don’t have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we’re talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion

Become a PEL Citizen!

As a PEL Citizen, you’ll have access to a private social community of philosophers, thinkers, and other partial examiners where you can join or initiate discussion groups dedicated to particular readings, participate in lively forums, arrange online meet-ups for impromptu seminars, and more. PEL Citizens also have free access to podcast transcripts, guided readings, episode guides, PEL music, and other citizen-exclusive material. Click here to join.

Blog Post Categories

  • (sub)Text
  • Aftershow
  • Announcements
  • Audiobook
  • Book Excerpts
  • Citizen Content
  • Citizen Document
  • Citizen News
  • Close Reading
  • Combat and Classics
  • Constellary Tales
  • Exclude from Newsletter
  • Featured Article
  • General Announcements
  • Interview
  • Letter to the Editor
  • Misc. Philosophical Musings
  • Nakedly Examined Music Podcast
  • Nakedly Self-Examined Music
  • NEM Bonus
  • Not School Recording
  • Not School Report
  • Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts
  • PEL Music
  • PEL Nightcap
  • PEL's Notes
  • Personal Philosophies
  • Phi Fic Podcast
  • Philosophy vs. Improv
  • Podcast Episode (Citizen)
  • Podcast Episodes
  • Pretty Much Pop
  • Reviewage
  • Song Self-Exam
  • Things to Watch
  • Vintage Episode (Citizen)
  • Web Detritus

Follow:

Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | Apple Podcasts

Copyright © 2009 - 2022 · The Partially Examined Life, LLC. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy · Terms of Use · Copyright Policy

Copyright © 2022 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in