Category: Belief

Michael Liccione on Private and Collective Judgment

Herewith, some comments on an excerpt from Michael Liccione, Faith, Private Judgment, Doubt, and Dissent.

So understood, private judgment can yield at least a measure of certitude, but not in any fashion certainty.

I agree that private judgment cannot deliver certainty, if objective certainty is in question. But I should think that the same is true of any collective judgment as well, including the collective judgments of the Roman Catholic magisterium.  I am a cradle Catholic, but my 'inner Protestant' demands his due.  In what follows, I will quote Liccione, agree with much of what he says, but try to explain why I cannot accept his ultimate conclusion.

If no human collectivity can be counted on implicitly to preserve and transmit the deposit of faith in its fullness, still less can any fallible, human individual. One can, for a lesser or greater time, feel certain that one is in possession of the faith once delivered; it can and does happen that the cognitive content of one’s faith thus contains much truth; one can even and thereby develop a genuine relationship of love and trust with Jesus Christ. But by one’s own profession one is no closer to infallibility, and probably less so, than any external human authority.

I agree with the above.     

Faith must accordingly co-exist with a principle if not always a feeling of doubt, and be hedged about by that principle. For if councils and popes can err even in their most solemn exercises of doctrinal authority, then so a fortiori can anybody who eschews for themselves or their own faith community the kind of authority those sources have claimed. Ultimately, then, one’s faith is a matter of opinion. No matter how great the certitude which which one holds one’s religious opinions, they are just that—human opinions, always and in principle open to revision, just as any and all churches are human organizations semper reformanda.

If there is no ecclesial any more than individual indefectibility, then there is no ecclesial any more than individual infallibility. In principle if not always and everywhere in practice, everything remains up for grabs. If by nothing else, that is proven by the apparently limitless capacity of Protestantism to devolve into denominations and sects who can agree only on the proposition that, whatever the Bible means, it doesn’t have God giving the Catholic or even the Orthodox Church the kind of interpretive authority they claim.

The above too strikes me as correct as long as it is understood that matters of opinion needn't be matters of mere opinion and that some opinions are better than others, whether these be the opinions of individuals or the opinions officially endorsed by groups.

Faith so constituted and developed is radically different from what the Catholic and Orthodox churches both think of as faith. On the latter showing, part of the content of faith is that the Church teaches about faith and morals with an authority divinely bestowed and maintained; the differences between Catholicism and Orthodoxy about how “the Church” manifests such authority are secondary; in either case, the assent of faith entails accepting, as divinely revealed, what the Church definitively proposes as such. Such assent is not a matter of opinion, as it would be if it were a merely human product rather than a divine gift. It does not merely entail certitude; the certitude is itself based on the objective relation of certainty. By that latter relation, what is believed is understood to be unchangeably true because its ultimate object, a God who neither deceives nor can be deceived, is the same who proposes, through his Church, what is to be believed. When faith so understood is accepted as a gift of the Holy Spirit, and thus of grace, it is a virtue infused into the soul and its faculties, chiefly the mind. While its cognitive content can and should deepen and develop along with the coordinate virtues of life, nevertheless one either has such a virtue or one does not. It is not a human product and does not depend on human opinion. And if one has it, then one has eo ipso abandoned private judgment in matters pertaining to it.

The crucial proposition is the following. For the Catholic and Orthodox churches, "part of the content of faith is that the Church teaches about faith and morals with an authority divinely bestowed and maintained . . . ." Part of what one believes, then, is that the Church teaches with divine authority: God himself teaches us through the Church. If so, then its specific teachings with respect to faith and morals are objectively certain. Being taught by God himself is as good as it gets, epistemically speaking. We also note that if the Church teaches with divine authority, then this teaching itself, namely, that the Church teaches with divine authority,  is objectively certain.  

But what justifies one's belief that this particular church teaches with divine authority? If it teaches with divine authority, then not only are the particulars of the  depositum fidei objectively and absolutely secured beyond all private judgment, but also the meta-claim to teach with divine authority is objectively and absolutely secured beyond all private judgment. But how do I know — where knowledge entails objective certainty — that the antecedent of the foregoing conditional is true? 

That is, how can I be objectively certain that the Catholic and Orthodox churches teach with divine authority?

Of course, I can believe it, and perhaps I can believe it reasonably. Reasonable belief does not, however, amount to objective certainty. So I can't be objectively certain of it, whence it follows that I can't be objectively certain that the collective judgment of the Roman Catholic magisterium with respect to faith and morals is infallible.  But I hear an objection coming.

"You believe it because the Church teaches it. And since the Church teaches with divine authority, you can be objectively certain that what you believe is true. And since part of what  the Church teaches is that it teaches with divine authority,  you can be objectively certain that the Church teaches with divine authority." 

This objection, however, is plainly circular.  I want to know how I can know with objective certainty that a  particular church, the Roman Catholic Church, is the unique divine mouthpiece, and I am told that I can know this with objective certainty because it is the unique divine mouthpiece. But this doesn't help due to its circularity.

Liccione speaks above of the assent of faith as a divine gift and not as something I create from my own resources.  Thus my acceptance of the Church's absolute authority and reliability with respect to faith and morals is a gift from God.  But even if this is so, how can I be objectively certain that it is so and that my acceptance is a divine gift? Again the circle rears its head: it is objectively certain that the acceptance is a divine gift because it is God who gives the gift through the Church.  

What Liccione is claiming on behalf of the Church is that it is an objectively self-certifying source of objectively certain truth with respect to faith and morals.  As objectively self-certifying, it needs no certification by us.  The Church is like God himself. God needs no external certification of his beliefs; he is the self-certifying source of his own certainty which is at once both subjective and objective.

Unfortunately, this doesn't help me. After all, I am the one who has to decide what to believe and how to live.  I am the one who needs salvation and needs to find the right path to it. I am the one who needs to decide whether I will accept the Church's authority. The Church doesn't need my certification, but I need to certify to my own satisfaction that the Church's CLAIM to be the unique objectively self-certifying source of objectively certain moral and soteriological knowledge is a CREDIBLE claim that I ought to accept.

The aporetic philosopher regularly finds himself in a bind. What bind am I in now? It looks to be the old business about Athens and Jerusalem whose recent heroes are Husserl and Shestov. Autonomous reason demands validation of all claims by its own lights. Faith says, "Obey, submit, stop asking questions, accept the heteronomy of the creature who owes everything to his Creator, including his paltry reason and its flickering lights.  Accept the divine gift of faith in humility."

To end on a romantic note, it seems somehow noble to stand astride the two great cities, with a leg in each, seeking, but not finding the coincidentia oppositorum, maintaining oneself in this tension until death reveals the answer or puts an end to all questions.

Truth, Fallibilism, Objectivism, and Dogmatism

It is important not to confuse the question of the fallibility of our cognitive faculties, including reason, with the question whether there is truth.  Truth is one thing, fallibility another. A fallibilist need not be a truth-denier.  One can be both a fallibilist and an upholder of truth.  What's more, one ought to be both a fallibilist about some, but not all, classes of propositions, and an upholder of the existence of  truth. Indeed, if one is a fallibilist, one who admits that we  sometimes go wrong in matters of knowledge and belief, then then one must also admit that we sometimes go right, which is to say that fallibilism presupposes the existence of truth. If we can be wrong about how Epstein met his end, then we can be right.

I spoke above of truth sans phrase, without qualification. There is no need to speak of objective or of absolute truth since truth by its very nature is objective and absolute.  Talk of relative truth is incoherent.  Of course, what I accept as true or believe to be true may well be different from what you accept as true or take to be true.  But that does not show that truth is relative; it shows that we differ in our beliefs. Suppose you believe that Hillary Clinton ran a child molestation ring out of a Washington, D. C pizza joint. I don't believe that.  You accept a proposition that I reject. But the proposition itself — that Hillary ran a molestation ring, etc. — is either true or false independently of anyone's belief state.

So don't confuse being true with being-believed-by-someone-or-other.

But what about an omnisicent being? Doesn't such a being believe all and only true propositions?  I should think so if the omniscient being has beliefs and has them  in the way we do. But does he believe the truths because they are true, or are they true because he believes them?  This is a nice little puzzle reminiscent of Plato's Euthryphro Paradox, to be found in the eponymous dialog.  (Indeed it has the same structure as that paradox.)  Note that the puzzle cannot get off the ground without the distinction between truth and belief — which is my point, or one of them.

(Like I said, it's all footnotes to Plato, but it's not all from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains.)

Just as a fallibilist is not a truth-denier, a truth-affirmer is not an infallibilist or 'dogmatist' in one sense of this word.  To maintain that there is objective truth is not to maintain that one is in possession of it in particular cases.  The upholder of the existence of truth need not be a dogmatist. One of the sources of the view that truth is subjective or relative is aversion to dogmatic people and dogmatic claims.

But if you reject the existence of objective truth on the basis of an aversion to dogmatic people and claims, then you are not thinking clearly.

Some Questions About Animal Suffering and Religious Belief

This just in from Karl White:
A couple of questions.
 
1. The gist of your posts seems to be that we can never know for sure that an evil is pointlessly evil, therefore no evil rules out definitively the potential existence of an omni-loving God.
 
Yes, that's the gist of it, but strike 'potential.'
 
So in your view does that imply that there is no amount of evil that could rule it out? If the entire planet were like Auschwitz would that still not rule it out? (And it is estimated that roughly 150 million animals are slaughtered per day for human consumption, so it could plausibly be maintained that for animals the world is a kind of Auschwitz.)
 
No. The idea is that the existence of evils that are necessary for a greater good are logically compatible with the existence of an all-good God. So the goods have to outweigh the evils.  It follows that there has to be a limit to how much evil there is.
 
And let's leave out of the present discussion the human slaughter of humans and animals, for that belongs under the rubric 'moral evil,' whereas the topic under discussion is natural evil. One question for a separate post is whether natural evil is itself a species of moral evil, namely, the evil perpetrated by fallen angels. But for now I will assume that natural evil is not a species of moral evil; I will assume that it is not the result of free agency.
 
To put it more formally: is there any state of affairs, call it X, that would rule out the existence of God?
 
Yes. Just one case of pointless or unjustified evil would rule out the existence of God.
 
I am uncomfortable with the idea of saying yes, as I suspect it pushes the notion of an omni-God toward the brink of meaninglessness. We generally think that if a proposition cannot be proven or disproven then it is in a certain sense meaningless or at best useless. The Theist will reply that the existence of God is a unique case and fine, but I still feel that we are within our rights to ask for some form of verification without having the whole concept of God becoming meaningless.
 
I rather doubt that  a proposition is meaningful iff it is verifiable. Consider the following proposition
 
a) My grandfather Alfonso drank a glass of dago red on 1 January 1940.
 
By Bivalence, (a) is either true, or if not true, then false.  And this is so even though it is impossible now to determine (a)'s truth value.  Since (a) must either be true or false, it must be meaningful, despite its unverifiability.  Similarly for 
 
b) The execution of Sophie Scholl (of White Rose fame) was not a pointless evil.
 
(b) is meaningful but not empirically verifiable in the present life.
 
Note also, that if one is a verificationist, there is no need to mess around with the problem of evil: one can put paid to all (synthetic) claims about God, such as the claim that God exists, by maintaining that they are meaningless because not empirically verifiable in the here and now.
 
2. You push the pragmatic, Pascalian line about the benefits of believing in God quite regularly. But isn't there a sort of question-begging to this, in that it assumes only beneficial consequences? What if someone reads the Quran, sees the lines about killing non-believers and thinks "I may as well, because if God exists, he'll reward me, and if he doesn't, it doesn't matter anyway." Or if someone adopts a religion that promotes the total subjection of women?
 
My Pascalianism is not blanket; it kicks in only in specific circumstances.  Islam is "the poorest and saddest form of theism" (Schopenhauer), It is clearly an inferior religion as compared to Christianity (morally if not metaphysically) if it (Islam) is a religion at all as opposed to a political ideology masquerading as a religion, or a Christian heresy (Chesterton).  It was founded by a warrior who was arguably a fraud and it enjoins immoral practices such the genital mutilation of girls, the subjection of women, and the slaughter of 'infidels.' . So if one exercises due doxastic diligence one excludes Islam and other pseudo-religions from the Pascalian option.
 
The Pascalian move is made in a situation like the following.  One is a serious and sensitive human being who cares about his ultimate felicity.  One is alive to the vanity of this world. One is psychologically capable of religious belief and appreciates that God and the soul are Jamesian live options. One is intellectually sophisticated enough to know that God and the soul can neither be proven nor disproven. One appreciates that not to choose to live as if God and the soul are real is to choose to live as if they are not real.  One understands that it is prudentially irrational to suspend judgment.  At this point the Pascalian reasoning kicks in.
 
By the way, my Pascalian move is merely reminiscent of he great Pascal; I am not concerned with accuracy to the details of his view.  I write as a kind of 'existentialist.' What matters is how I live here and now and what helps me here and now.  I borrow what is useful and appropriable by me here and now; I am not committed to the whole Pascalian kit-and-kaboodle.

More on Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil with Responses to Caiati and Pollack

Vito Caiati, to whom I responded earlier, replies:

In your excellent response to my email on animal suffering and theism, you write, “If one suffers from the problem of (natural) evil, there is little a philosopher qua philosopher can do. Pastoral care is not his forte. But if one can gain some intellectual light on the philosophical problem, that light might help with the existential-psychological problem.” This is precisely the sort of help that you have provided me, and I sincerely thank you it. I have struggled with the problem of animal pain and suffering most of my life, and it has long poked into my theistic beliefs like a sharp thorn. In considering the empirical fact of the baby elephant’s atrocious death, I now see that I assumed what instinctively horrified me was objectively evil and hence pointlessly evil. I now understand that, although I continue to hate the empirical fact, this assumption is unwarranted.

I am fortunate to have attracted Dr. Caiati as a correspondent.  The attraction of the like-minded is one of the beauties of blog. The formulation in the penultimate sentence above, however, is not quite right.  If a state of affairs is objectively evil, it does not follow that it is pointlessly evil. It may or may not be. As I see it, the pointlessly evil is a proper subset of the objectively evil. Everything pointlessly evil is objectively evil, but not conversely. Evils can be justified by greater goods that they subserve. They remain evils, however,  even if justified. It could be — it is possible for all we know — that predation is justified by a greater good unattainable without predation.  And this is so whether or not we can know, or even imagine, what this greater good might be. The main point here is that there is reason to doubt whether an event or a state of affairs that is  objectively evil is also pointlessly evil.  

The following two propositions cannot both be true:

1) God (defined in terms of the standard omni-attributes) exists.

2) Pointless (unjustified, gratuitous) evils exist.

So if (2) is true, then (1) is false. But how do we know that (2) is true? Is (2) true? What the skeptical theist will point out is that we cannot directly and validly infer (2) from

3) Objective evils exist.

This allows the theist 'doxastic wiggle room.'   He is not rationally compelled to abandon theism in the face of (3). (1) and (3) can both be true.  And this is so even if I cannot explain how it is possible that they both be true.

Vito continues:

I had thought to place my instinctive reaction on a different plane than St. Paul’s declaration that one can see “that the universe is a divine artifact, and that God exists from the things that have been made,” in that the latter involves a two stage intellectual process, that of (1) the perception of an empirical fact, the existence and nature of the universe, and (2) the attribution of this fact to the action of some conscious cause, that is, to the action of a predefined concept of a Creator God, as understood in the Judaic and early Christian traditions. In the case of the baby elephant, I believed that the additive [additional] conceptual stage was not involved, since my emotional reaction was akin to what most of humanity feels when encountering a horrendous evil, such as a pointless cruelty or murder. In other words, I took it as an instinctive moral reaction that preceded any conceptualization. As such, I assumed that its source was inherent in my moral essence as a man and hence prior to discursive argument. From what you write, I now see that I was probably wrong in making this assumption, since the empirical event gives me only the right to my emotional reaction and not to any larger philosophical claims as to the nature of God that I would care to derive from it.

Vito understands me quite well.

To give the Pauline two-step a Kantian twist: I am filled with wonder by "the starry sky above me and the moral law within me." That is the first step.  The second step is to infer straightaway that there must be a transcendent Creator of the universe who is also the Source of the moral law within me.  One can reasonably doubt the validity of that immediate inference.  (And if you try to mediate it by the adducing of some further proposition, then the skeptic will train his sights upon that proposition.) By the same token, one can reasonably doubt that the extremely strong, pervasive, and obtrusive appearance of unjustified natural evil is a veridical appearance, and thus that the objective evil of predation is a pointless or unjustified evil.

Malcolm Pollack, responding to my first response to Caiati, and targeting my claim that in the end one must decide what to believe and how to live, writes:

"One must decide.” Well, yes — but how? Bill shows us that reason alone has insufficient grounds for a verdict; neither case is proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Upon what do we fall back, then? [. . .]

So — if reason is helpless to acquit, and conscience votes to convict, then what is left for the believer? Only the persistence of his sense of the transcendent, and the yearning to believe. If we are to let God off the hook, the problem of “pointless evil” must simply be set aside as a mystery beyond our comprehension. Can we do it? Ought we do it?

I am not sure that Malcolm understands quite what I mean when I say that "one must decide what to believe" in the final analysis and with respect to a matter like this. He wants to how one decides. Answer: You just do it after having reviewed all the considerations pro et contra.  It's a free decision. There is no algorithm.  There is no decision procedure that one can mechanically follow. The considerations pro and con do not decide the matter. What you "fall back upon" is is your own free choice to either believe that (1) or to believe that (2). You stop thinking and perform an act of will. Thought is endless and its conclusions are inconclusive. Thought goes around and around.  To take a stand one must jump of the merry-go-round.

"But isn't that arbitrary?" Of course, in one sense of 'arbitrary.' But not in the sense of being random or uninformed by rational considerations pro and con that precede the decision. The necessity of action, the necessity of an abrupt shift from the plane of thought to the plane of action, ought to dawn on one once one sees that (i) one must act, and that (ii) reasons, taken singly or collectively, do not necessitate a course of action.  This is most obvious when one is in a state of 'doxastic equipoise,' that situation in which the considerations pro and the considerations con cancel out.  But even if one set of reasons strikes one as stronger than the other, opposing, set, one still has to stop thinking and decide to act on the stronger set of reasons. For if one continues thinking, one will almost certainly modify if not reject one's initial assessment.

There are all these considerations that speak for God and all these others ones that speak against God, the loudest being those having to do with evil.  The Leibnizian "Gentlemen, let us calculate" cuts no ice in a situation like this.  As I said, there is no algorithm. There is no rational procedure that does the work  for me.   The work is done by an act of will, informed, but not necessitated, by the reasons that  the intellect surveys.  It would be nice if there were reasons the contemplation of which would force me this way or that in a matter like the one before us. The truth, however, is that I am forced, not to believe this or that, but to take responsibility for what I believe whatever it is.

Seeing as how I cannot achieve the fixation of belief by continuing to mull over reasons pro and con, I achieve said fixation by an act of will.

"Why not suspend belief?"  One is free to do that, of course. One might just take no position on the question whether God exists or not and whether there are pointless evils or not.  But the taking of no position is itself a free decision. One decides not to decide. Not to decide is to decide. Now this might be theoretically reasonable, but for beings like us, interested (inter esse)  beings,  this is practically and prudentially unreasonable.

Consider the question of the existence of the (immortal) soul. Can one prove its existence? No. Can one prove its nonexistence? No. Are there good arguments on both sides? Yes. Is the cumulative case on the one side stronger than the cumulative case on the other? Possibly. But you still have to decide what you will believe in this matter and how you will live. 

Suppose you decide to suspend judgment and forget about the whole matter. You will then live as if there is no (immortal) soul and not attend to its care or worry about its future well-being.  You will not have committed yourself theoretically, but you will have committed yourself existentially. Should the soul prove to exist, then you will have acted imprudently.  You will have acted in a prudentially irrational way.

If, on the other hand, you live as if God and the soul are real, and it turns out that they are not, what have you lost?  Nothing of any value comparable to the value of what you will gain if God and the soul turn out to be real and you lived in the belief that they are real. I put this question to an atheist a while back and he replied, "You lost your intellectual integrity."  Not so!  For both belief and unbelief are rationally acceptable.  

So I will say the following to Malcolm.  Not everyone is psychologically capable of religious belief, but if you are, and if you agree that it could be the case for all we know that God and the soul are real, and that the pro arguments have weight even f they are not rationally compelling, then I say: go ahead and believe and act in accordance with the beliefs.  What harm could it do?

And it might make you a better man.  For example, if you believe that you will be judged post-mortem for what you did and left undone in this life, then this belief might contribute to your being a better man than you would have been without this belief — even if the belief  turns out to be false.   Religion does not have to be true to be life-enhancing and conducive to human flourishing.  If, however, you believe it not to be true, then you won't live in accordance with it, and it will not have any life-enhancing effect.

Vows

Vows make for stability of life in a changeful world. But change is sometimes improvement, and this includes change in belief. The vows that stabilized can come to cramp and confine. Doubt sets in and commitment wanes. Fervent belief becomes lukewarm. A monk like Merton can come to wonder whether he has thrown his life away in world-flight.

And so we bang up against another 'interesting ' problem. To live well one must have firm beliefs and fixed commitments. But one must also avoid rigidity and dogmatism. One must see to it that rigor mentis does not become rigor mortis. One must find the middle course between rudderless drift on the high seas of uncertainty and blinkered fixation on a 'safe harbor' the attainment of which would be shipwreck on a reef.

Seriously Philosophical Theses and Argument Cancellation

Reader C. P. inquires,
Do you think that the arguments for and against every substantive philosophical thesis are equipollent [equal in force], or do you think only that we can never be certain about the truth of the theses? In some of your posts, you suggest that you think the former (e.g. here); but in others, you suggest that you think we can determine some theses as more likely true than others.  I'm fairly sure that you hold the former, but I thought I should make sure.
The question, as I would formulate it,  is whether every substantive philosophical thesis is such that the arguments for it and the arguments against it are equally plausible and thus 'cancel out,'  or whether some substantive philosophical theses are rationally preferable to their negations.  I begin by explaining my terminology.

D1. An argument for a thesis T cancels out an argument for the negation of T just in case both arguments are equally plausible, or not far from equally plausible, to the producers(s)/consumers(s) of the arguments, assuming that these individuals are 'competent practitioners.'

Plausibility is relative to an arguer and his audience, if any.  With respect to propositions, plausibility is not the same as truth.  A plausible proposition needn't be true, and a true proposition needn't be plausible. With respect to arguments, plausibility is neither validity nor soundness as these are standardly defined.  Validity and soundness are absolute, like truth herself. Plausibility is relative.   There cannot be sound arguments both for a thesis and its negation. For if there is a sound argument for T, then T is true. And if there is a sound argument for ~T, then ~T is true. This is logical fallout from the standard definition of 'sound' according to which a sound argument is one that is deductive, valid, and has only true premises.  If there are sound arguments for both a thesis T and its negation ~T, then (T & ~T) is true which violates the Law of Non-Contradiction.  Therefore, there cannot be sound arguments for a thesis and its negation.

So I am envisaging situations in which argument and counter-argument are equally plausible or nearly so but only one is sound.  Equally plausible to whom? It could be one and the same philosopher. Preston, for example, finds the arguments for and against a regularity theory of causation equally plausible. For him the arguments cancel out and he ends up in a state of doxastic equipoise with respect to the issue. From there he might go on to suspend judgment on the question, or he might investigate further.  A third option for one who ends up in doxastic equipoise is to leap to one side or the other.  Suppose, after canvassing the arguments for and against the existence of God, or those for and against the immortality of the soul, you find that the cumulative case for and the cumulative case against are equally plausible.  You might leap to one side for prudential or pragmatic reasons.  You would have no theoretical reason for the leap, but also no theoretical reason against the leap. But the leap might nonetheless be prudentially rational and the refusal to leap prudentially irrational. 

Or the plausibility could be to a group of philosophers.  Suppose the group has ten members, with five finding the arguments for more plausible than the arguments against, and five taking the opposite stance.  I will then say that argument and counter-argument are equally plausible to the group.  As I set up the example, none of the members of this group are in a state of doxastic equipoise. But I will make bold to claim that each of them ought to be, assuming that each of them is a competent practitioner. This claim is controversial, and needs defending, but I must move on. 

A competent practitioner is not the same as an epistemic peer.  A number of individuals may be epistemic peers, but all incompetent. I won't try for a crisp definition of 'competent practitioner,' but if one is a competent practitioner,  then he is a sincere truth seeker, not a quibbler or a sophist; he knows logic and the empirical disciplines that bear upon the arguments he is discussing; he is familiar with the relevant literature; he embodies the relevant intellectual virtues, and so on.

The answer to the reader's question will depend on what counts as a substantive or seriously philosophical thesis (SPT).  Such theses cannot be denials or affirmations of Moorean facts. Such a fact is roughly a deliverance of common sense. STPs are not at the level of data, but at the level of theory. The distinction between data and theory is not sharply drawn. Border disputes are possible. The theoretical bleeds into the datanic and vice versa. Theories are data-driven, but some data are theory-laden. But I don't believe one can get on without the data-theory distinction.

For example, it is a Moorean fact that some things no longer exist.  This cannot be reasonably disputed. Affirm the datum or deny it, you are not (yet) doing philosophy.  That Boston's Scollay Square no longer exists is not a philosophical claim, but a proto-philosophical or pre-analytic datum. But if you maintain that what no longer exists does not exist at all, then you go beyond the given to affirm a controversial philosophical thesis known as presentism.  Roughly, this is the thesis that, with respect to  items in time, only what exists at present exists, period.  (It implies that the Wholly No Longer and the Wholly Not Yet are realms of nonexistence.) This is hardly common sense despite what some presentists claim.  If Scollay Square is now nothing at all, then how could it be the object of veridical memories and the subject of true predications? A predicate cannot be true of an item unless the item exists.

If, on the other hand, you maintain that what no longer exists does exist, albeit tenselessly, then you are affirming a controversial philosophical thesis known in the trade as eternalism.  Eternalism will enable you  to explain how a wholly past item can be the object of veridical thoughts and the subject of true predications. But if you try to explain what 'tenseless' means in this context, you will soon entangle yourself in difficulties.  Both presentism and eternalism are examples of what I am calling seriously philosophical theses, they cannot both be true, and neither records a Moorean fact.

For a second example, consider the claim that consciousness is an illusion. This is not an SPT, despite its having been urged by philosophers of high repute.  It is either beneath refutation or is quickly refuted by a simple argument: illusions presuppose consciousness; ergo, consciousness is not an illusion.  There are any number of eliminativist claims that are not SPTs.   The claim that there are no claims, for example, 'sounds philosophical' but cannot be taken seriously: it is not an SPT.    On the other hand, there are eliminativist claims that are SPTs, for example, the claim that there is no such person as God, or that continuants such as tables and trees do not have temporal parts. 

In sum, if you affirm what is obvious or deny what is obvious you are not making a seriously philosophical claim even if what you affirm or deny is highly general and is apt to ignite philosophical controversy when brought into contact with other propositions. For example, if you affirm that some events are earlier than others, you simply a record a datum that no sane person can deny.  If, on the other hand, you affirm that everything that people believe is true then you affirm what is datanically false and no object of rational controversy. 

I consider all of the following examples of SPTs:

  • There are no nonexistent objects.
  • There are uninstantiated properties.
  • There are no modes of existence.
  • The properties of particulars are tropes, not universals.
  • God exists.
  • The soul is immortal.
  • The human will is libertarianly free.
  • Each of us is numerically identical to his living body.
  • I am not my living body; I merely have a living body.
  • Anima forma corporis.
  • Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung.
  • Laws of nature are just empirical regularities.
  • Truths need truth-makers.
  • Only facts could serve as truth-makers.
  • There are no facts.
  • Relations reduce to their monadic foundations.
  • There are no properties, only predicates.
  • The predicate 'true' serves only as a device for disquotation.
  • Social and economic inequalities are justified only if they benefit the worst-off.

There are many more examples, of course. Now what do the above  examples have in common? None of them records a Moorean fact. That is, none of them, if true,  is obviously true or datanically true.  Example.  There are two tomatoes on my counter, both ripe, and both (the same shade of) red.  That is a given, a datum, not subject to philosophical dispute, certain hyperbolic forms of skepticism aside.  But it is not a datum, phenomenological or otherwise, that the redness of the tomatoes is a universal, a repeatable entity, whether a transcendent universal (a one-over-many) or an immanent universal (a one-in-many).   For there is an alternative theory according to which the properties of particulars are themselves particulars (unrepeatables). On this theory each tomato has its own redness. Accordingly, there are two rednesses in the example, not one.  Both theories explain the data, but they cannot both be true. Phenomenology does not suffice to decide between them; dialectic must be brought in.  Once you get the dialectical ball rolling, you will have a hard time stopping it. It will roll down a rabbit hole that opens out into a labyrinth . . . .

Having clarified what I mean by a substantive or serious philosophical thesis, I now state two  meta-philosophical theses that I am considering. 

The strong thesis is that every SPT is such that the arguments for it and against it cancel out in the sense defined in (D1) above. This implies that no SPT is rationally preferable to its negation. I have my doubts about the strong thesis.

The weak thesis is that a proper subset of SPTs are such that the arguments for and against cancel out. I strongly suspect that the theses that most concern us belong to the proper subset, the hard core of insolubilia.

On the weak thesis, some SPTs will be theoretically-rationally preferable to others.

Is She Believable?

It depends on what 'believable' means. 

Many find Christine Blasey Ford 'credible' or 'believable.'  But there is a tendency among the commentariat to conflate her believability with the believability of the content of her allegation against Judge Kavanaugh. Those of us who want to think clearly about this SCOTUS confirmation business need to keep some distinctions in mind.

There are two main senses of 'credible/believable' in the vicinity and they need to be distinguished. There is the credibility of persons and the credibility of propositions. 

Credibility of Persons

Within the credibility of persons we should further distinguish sincerity from trustworthiness.  Does Dr. Ford sincerely believe what she alleges against Judge Kavanaugh?  I think so. So I find her credible in that sense. I don't think she is trying to deceive us. She seems to be saying what she sincerely believes is the truth. One can say what is false without lying.  So even if what she is saying is false, she can sincerely assert it. Bret Stephens says he "found her wholly believable. If she’s lying, she will face social and professional ruin." She is believable in the sense that she seems not to be lying. So that is one sense of personal believability.

But is she a trustworthy witness? That is a more difficult question. Even if she is a trustworthy witness in general, was she one that night when she was drinking? I don't know. A person can be believable in the sense of apparently sincere and apparently truth-telling without being  trustworthy because, perhaps, she has a tendency to confabulate.  So we should distinguish believability as sincerity from believability as trustworthiness.  

Credibility of Propositions

But Ford's personal credibility is not really the issue. The issue is whether the content of her allegation is credible. The alleging is one thing, the content another. Part of that content is the proposition that Brett Kavanaugh sexually molested her.  That proposition could have been alleged by people other than Ford. Is the proposition itself credible?

But what does credible mean? It means believable. But the '___able' suffix is ambiguous. Is the proposition such that some people have the ability to believe it? Yes, of course, but that is not the relevant sense of 'believable.'  People believe the damndest things and thus many false and absurd propositions are believable. They are believable because they are believed.

The relevant sense of 'believable' is normative: Is the proposition alleged worthy of belief? Is it a proposition that ought to be believed by a rational person, or may be believed by a rational person?  Is it epistemically permissible to believe that Brett Kavanaugh sexually molested Ford?

It is only if there is sufficient evidence. How much evidence is needed? Well, it has to be more than her say-so even if it  is a sincere say-so.  Suppose Ford sincerely states what she sincerely believes is the truth. That is not sufficient evidence that Kavanaugh in fact molested her.  But no other evidence has turned up: there are no corroborating witnesses, for example.

I conclude that Ford is not believable in the only sense that matters: the content of her allegation is not supported by enough evidence to make it worthy of belief.  Her testimony should be dismissed and Kavanaugh should be confirmed.

Related: Sex-Crimes Prosecutor Details 12 Massive Inconsistencies in Kavanaugh Accuser's Story

On Loss of Faith in the Roman Catholic Church

Rod Dreher writes,

At the risk of oversharing, the most painful thing about covering the scandal from 2002 until I left the Catholic Church in 2006 was losing my Catholic faith, which had been at the center of my life since my conversion in 1993.

If I have the story right, Mr. Dreher has moved from the RCC east to Orthodoxy.  If so, then we can safely assume that he is still a theist who believes in the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, and much else besides. So his loss of his Catholic faith was his loss of faith in the Roman church as the one, true, holy, catholic (universal) and apostolic church founded by Christ.  As he says a little later,

What’s worth pointing out is that the final straw was realizing that my wife and I could not trust the institution anymore.

One question that arises is whether it would be reasonable to cleave to one's faith in the institution as divinely ordained in the teeth of all the revelations of evil deeds and cover-ups.

I should think that this would prove psychologically impossible for many if not most of the laity. But I also think one could reasonably remain within the church if one accepts its traditional teachings. Michael Liccione on his Facebook page writes,

I'm Catholic because I believe that the only principled way to distinguish between divine revelation and human opinion is by the teaching of a visible authority, established by Jesus himself and temporally continuous with the Apostles, that is preserved from error by the Holy Spirit when teaching with her full authority. That's the authority which I believe the gates of hell will not prevail against. So even if the Catholic Church had to go underground, and thus become invisible to most people, there would still be her teaching and sacraments to sustain us, even if only through a few.

I would add the following. The Church is in the world where Satan is at work. So it is no surprise that Satan is at work in the Church. But if the Church was founded by Christ, the God-Man, and the current Church can trace itself back to the Founder, then there is 'no way in hell' that the gates of hell can prevail against it.

So if one accepts the RC worldview in all of its major tenets, as I believe Liccione does, then it is reasonable to cleave to one's faith in the institution as divinely ordained in the teeth of all the revelations of evil deeds and cover-ups.  This is because the worldview has the resources to explain away the appearance of its own fraudulence.

Of course, this leaves us with the problem of whether it is reasonable to accept the RC worldview in the first place.  Many will no doubt take the deep levels of corruption as good evidence that the Roman church was never the one, true, holy, catholic (universal) and apostolic church that enjoys divine sanction and is ongoingly guided by the Holy Ghost.  

But if one accepts Roman Catholicism in its orthodox form, then it is reasonable to stick with the faith despite the psychological difficulty of doing so at the present time.

Here's my problem. I accept God and the possibility of divine revelation, and I understand the need for a principled way to distinguish divine revelation from human opinion.  But what validates the RCC as this principled way and means? Well, it validates itself.

Is there a problem with that? For more on the general problem of the need for a "visible authority"  see Private Judgment? 

When Reasoned Faith No Longer Strikes One as Reasonable: What Then?

Thomas Doubting inquires,

I’ve met and talked to a number of people who, while originally atheists, have found faith in God and become active Christians as result of their intellectual pursuit that led them to the conclusion that God is logically necessary.

There is an ambiguity regarding 'logically necessary' that needs to be removed. Suppose there is a sound deductive argument A for the existence of God.  Necessarily, if the premises of A are all true, then A's conclusion — God exists — is true.  That is not to be confused with: If the premises of A are all true, then A's conclusion — God exists — is necessarily true.

The necessitas consequentiae must not be confused with the necessitas consequentis. See my separate post on this topic.  The premises of a sound argument logically necessitate its conclusion, but that does not imply that the conclusion is logically necessary.  

So even if one succeeds in demonstrating the existence of God, one has not thereby demonstrated the existence of a necessary being. For one might have succeeded only in demonstrating the existence of a logically contingent being.

I will read you as saying that there are people who come to faith in God via deductive arguments that they consider to be sound, just that, without the additional idea that the God so demonstrated is a necessary being.

Other relevant sources of ambiguity: Are you thinking of persons whose faith is SOLELY based on argumentative considerations?  Are the argumentative considerations demonstrative only, or are probabilistic considerations relevant?  

I will assume an affirmative answer to both questions.

I've always wanted to know, but was a bit uncomfortable to ask, how well are they prepared to deal with a quite conceivable situation where they should accidentally discover that their investigation was logically flawed and from the rational point their conclusion is not valid and, therefore the their faith in God’s existence has no logical grounding. 

In other words, if your intellect guided you on the road to God and in the years following the finding of God you developed strong faith in and love for God would you still cling to your faith if you had suddenly discovered that the reasoning that brought you to Him was defective?

Suppose someone comes to accept the existence of God on the basis of one or more arguments, but then discovers that those arguments are flawed. It would not follow from this that the person's reasoned faith has no logical grounding. For there could easily be other arguments that establish the existence of God.

So your question is better put as follows.   "Suppose a person who became a theist solely on the basis of arguments comes to believe that there is no extant argument that demonstrates the existence of God. Would that person be justified in clinging to his faith in God?" 

The question is interesting and important but also very complicated. I'll just make a couple of points.

Does the person also believe that there is no extant argument that demonstrates the non-existence of God?  Suppose that is the case. Then the person has three beliefs: that God exists; that God's existence cannot be demonstrated; that God's non-existence cannot be demonstrated.  Is he rationally justified in holding all three?  The theoretically-rational course would be to suspend judgment on the question of God's existence by neither affirming that God exists nor denying that God exists.  

But there is also prudential rationality to consider. If the arguments pro et contra cancel out, then God might or might not exist for all we know.  Believing would then be the prudentially rational thing to do, and pragmatically useful to boot. This is because the question of the existence of God is not a merely theoretical question, but one that bears upon our ultimate happiness and well-being.

If, on the other hand, the person in question has come to believe that some argument demonstrates the non-existence of God, then to be rational he ought to reject belief in God.  Or so it will seem to most.

But it is not that clear. Suppose one believes that there are no good arguments for the existence of God, but there are good arguments for the nonexistence of God, arguments from evil, say.  Suppose the person is also skeptical about the power of reason to decide such a weighty, metaphysical question.

Would it not be prudentially rational for him to go on believing? After all, God might exist.  And what would one lose by believing? What one would lose by believing would be as nothing as compared to what one might gain by believing and coming into right relation with God.

Related: Is it Sometimes Rational to Believe on Insufficient Evidence?  

 

Anti-Natalism and the Search for Truth

C. L. writes and I respond in blue:

You never seem to allow comments on the posts I want to comment on, so I'm forced to add another email to  your overwhelming pile.

BV: Well, my pile is not that bad. This is one of the many benefits of relative obscurity. And I am happy to receive your response.

Because I generally agree with you so much, I don't write too often. I don't even write where I moderately disagree with you. And I try not to write even where we sit on opposite ends of the table, because you are a trained philosopher and I am a dilettante.

For example, I tried to let this anti-natalism stuff pass by, but you posted again on it today with your typical caveat that you are out to seek truth wherever it may be found. I suppose I find that a bit cavalier when you are dealing with far-out ideas like anti-natalism because it seems so intuitively implausible, and not just to myself.

I think that though we both seek truth (and I am making an educated guess here so you'll forgive me the offence if I'm wrong), the reason I don't take anti-natalism seriously is because I am a Christian first and philosopher second, and you do because you are a philosopher first and a Christian (theist) second, which would explain your mantra about seeking truth wherever it is found as justification for taking this idea seriously. 

BV: I will first point out that there is a anti-natalist strain in Christianity.  See, for example, More on Christian Anti-Natalism and the accompanying comment thread. So it is not clear that Christianity rules out anti-natalism in such a way as to make it impossible for any Christian to take it seriously.  The logically prior question, of course, is: What is Christianity? Decide that question and then you will be in a  position to decide whether Christianity is anti-natalist.

I will also point out that if you set store by plausibility and reject without examination the implausible, then you ought to reject orthodox (miniscule 'o') Christianity since its central doctrine is an apparent (and many would say real) absurdity or logical contradiction.  And so is the doctrine of the Trinity which Chalcedonian incarnationalism requires. See, for example, the work of the Christian philosopher, Dale Tuggy. Both of these constitutive doctrines are apparently absurd for reasons I examine in detail in the Trinity and Incarnation category. However we analyze 'implausible,' it is clear that what is apparently absurd is implausible.  So if you reject without examination the implausible, then you should reject without examination Christianity. And if you don't do the latter, then you shouldn't reject anti-natalism without examination.

And then there is the fact that you simply reject Benatar's views without examining his arguments. That's what ideologues do, not philosophers. The arguments raise important questions as should be obvious from my ongoing series. So one can learn from his work even f in the end one doesn't accept his arguments.

A tougher and deeper fourth issue concerns how philosophy and a revelation-based religion such as Christianity are related. There is a tension here and it is the tension between Athens (Greek philosophy) and Jerusalem (the Bible), the two main roots of the West whose fruitful entanglement is the source of the West's vitality.    As Leo Strauss sees it, it is a struggle over the unum necessarium, the one thing needful or necessary:

To put it very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is the life of autonomous understanding.  The one thing needful as spoken by the Bible is the life of obedient love.  The harmonizations and synthesizations are possible because Greek philosophy can use obedient love in a subservient function, and the Bible can use philosophy as a handmaid; but what is so used in each case rebels against such use, and therefore the conflict is really a radical one. ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 246, bolding added.)

Even a  philosopher who is open to the claims of Revelation will feel duty-bound qua philosopher by his intellectual conscience to examine the epistemic credentials of Biblical revelation lest he unjustifiably accept what he has no right to accept.  This attitude is personified by Edmund Husserl.  On his death bed, cared for by Catholic nuns, open to the Catholic faith which some of his star pupils had embraced,  he was yet unable to make the leap, remarking that it was too late for him, that he would need for each dogma five years of investigation!  That attitude is typical of a real philosopher.   If you can't 'relate to it' then you don't understand the demands of the philosophical vocation.  The philosopher is called to a certain sort of life, the life of autonomous understanding, as Strauss so well puts it.

It is a tough problem and the conflict is really radical as Strauss says. The sense of intellectual honesty and intellectual responsibility in a great philosopher like Husserl is burningly strong. Someone who shares this sense cannot easily accept without careful scrutiny some religion that he happens to have been brought up on. On the other hand, where does philosophy get us? Husserl bent every fiber of his being to establishing philosophy as strict science, strenge Wissenschaft, but he failed to persuade even his best and closest students. I am thinking of Edith Stein who, while recognizing Husserl as her 'master,' in the end turned to Thomas and became a Carmelite nun. And then there is Roman Ingarden, an outstanding but neglected thinker who rejected Husserl's transcendental idealism.  Heidegger, the most influential of Husserl's students, was also soon on his own exploring strange and dark Black Forest paths and wood trails. (The allusion is to his Holzwege.)

You have also said elsewhere that there is nary an argument (that is not either self-evident or tautological) that is uncontested by philosophers. 

BV: Right. That's the trouble with philosophy. None of its conclusions are conclusive. Nothing gets settled to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners.  Dogmatists confidently assert substantive theses, but it is mostly if not always bluster. The problems of philosophy are genuine, and many of them are humanly important; but none of them has ever been solved in a way that makes it clear that it has been solved.  The strife of systems continues unabated. But that is hardly a reason simply to plump for some ideology.

The only purpose of seeking truth is to find it (and probably to let others know about it once you have). But if you sought and you have found it (or are convinced you have found it), then what good is it to entertain truths that run contrary to it (or are precluded by it)? This just seems like regress, not progress. It's like considering infanticide when you already reject abortion. 

BV: True, we seek in order to find. And it is true that some convince themselves, or become convinced, that they have found the truth.  Such a one was Edith Stein:

In the summer of 1921, she spent several weeks in Bergzabern (in the Palatinate) on the country estate of Hedwig Conrad-Martius, another pupil of Husserl's. Hedwig had converted to Protestantism with her husband. One evening Edith picked up an autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila and read this book all night. "When I had finished the book, I said to myself: This is the truth." Later, looking back on her life, she wrote: "My longing for truth was a single prayer."

Now here is the question: If one is convinced that one has the truth, and this truth is logically incompatible with some thesis T (e.g., Benatar's anti-natalism), is one rationally justified in rejecting T and in refusing to examine the arguments in support of it?

I would say No. Note first that the conviction that one has the truth is a mere subjective certainty. No matter how psychologically powerful this certainty is, it does not entail objective certainty. One can be subjectively certain and still be mistaken.  Christopher Hitchens, who died on this date six years ago, was subjectively certain that there is no God. Edith Stein was convinced that there is. It follows that subjective certainty does not entail objective certainty. They can't both be right; so one of the subjective certainties was merely subjective. 

Given that subjective certainty does not entail objective certainty, the really serious truth-seeker must remain open to the possibility that he is mistaken about that of which he is subjectively certain.  If he is really serious about truth, and intellectually honest, he must ongoingly examine his doxastic commitments. He must hold them tentatively. This is not to say that he will easily relinquish them; it is to say that he will remain self-critical.  This strikes me as the right attitude here below for we who are in statu viae.  Doxastic rest, if it comes at all, comes later.  To rest prematurely would seem to indicate a lack of seriousness about the pursuit of truth.  It would seem to indicate more of a desire for comfort than a desire for truth.

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David Benatar in <i>The New Yorker</i>

Faith, Reason, and Edith Stein

Today, August 9th, is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy.  She is better known to philosophers as the Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic church. One best honors a philosopher by re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically but critically. Herewith, a bit of critical re-enactment.

In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Husserl and Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.

Does Your Disagreement Give Me Good Reason to Question My Position?

In general, no. For you may be foolish or ignorant or otherwise incompetent with respect to the subject matter under discussion. Or you may be morally defective: a bully, a blowhard, a bullshitter, a quibbler, a sophist.  But suppose none of these predicates attach to you.  Suppose you are my moral and intellectual peer, and what's more, a competent practitioner in the discipline or subdiscipline which is home to the thesis we are disputing. Thus we are both competent, and we are equally competent. And suppose I believe you to be as intellectually honest and as competent as I am.

Suppose further that I have given careful thought to my thesis and have advanced it in respectable, peer-reviewed journals.

If you disagree with me, does this fact supply a good reason for me to question my thesis?  Ought I question it? Or would I be justified in ignoring your disagreement?

We note that this is a meta-question that sires a meta-disagreement.  This meta-disagreement is between the Conciliationist and the Steadfaster.

I am a Conciliationist. Thus I tend to think that your disagreement with me (given the stipulations above) ought to give me pause. It ought to cause me to re-examine my view and be open to the possibility of either rejecting it or withholding assent from it.  It ought to undermine my epistemic self-confidence. I tend to think I would be intellectually amiss, less than intellectually honest, were I simply to dismiss your disagreement. I tend to think I would be unjustifiably privileging my own point of view, preferring it over yours simply because is is mine. This seems wrong to me given that we are trying to arrive at the objective and impersonal truth.  Truth cannot be mine or yours.

The Steadfaster stands fast in the face of disagreement. Whereas the Conciliationist allows the fact of disagreement to undermine his epistemic self-confidence, the Steadfaster takes the fact of disagreement to undermine his prior conviction that his interlocutor is as morally and intellectually capable as he initially thought he was. So when you disagree with me, I question whether I am right. But when I disagree with you, you question my competence, rationality, probity, etc.

But now a puzzle arises. If I am a Conciliationist, then my position would seem to require that I question my Conciliationism due to the fact that the Steadfaster disagrees with me.  (Assume that the Steadfaster is as morally and intellectually well-endowed as I am and that I believe him to be such.)

It seems that the consistent Conciliationist cannot be steadfast in his Conciliationism given that there are Steadfasters out there who are, and whom he believes to be, his moral and intellectual equals.  So what should our Conciliationist do? Should he:

  • Suspend judgment and neither affirm nor deny Conciliationism?
  • Make an exception for the Conciliationst thesis itself by steadfastly adhering to it ar the meta-level while remaining otherwise a Conciliationist?
  • Reject Conciliationism and become a Steadfaster?
  • Do something else?
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Belief Skepticism, Justification Skepticism, and the Big Questions

1) The characteristic attitude of the skeptic is not denial, but doubt. There are three main mental attitudes toward a proposition: affirm, deny, suspend. To doubt is neither to affirm nor to deny. It can therefore be assimilated to suspension. Thus a skeptic neither affirms nor denies; he suspends judgment, withholds assent, takes no stand. This obvious distinction between doubting and denying is regularly ignored in political polemics. Thus  global warming skeptics are often unfairly tagged by leftists as global warming denialists as if they are willfully rejecting some well-known fact.

2) The skeptic is not a cynic. A cynic is a disillusioned idealist. The cynic affirms an ideal, notes that people fail to live up to it, allows himself to become inordinately upset over this failure, exaggerates the extent of the failure, and then either harshly judges his fellows or wrongly impugns their integrity. His attitude is predicated on the dogmatic affirmation of an ideal. Skeptics, by contrast are free, or try to be free, of dogmatic commitments, and of consequent moral umbrage.

Cynic: "All politicians are liars!" Skeptic: "What makes you think that scrupulous truth-telling is the best policy in all circumstances? And what makes you think that truth is a high value?"

3) One can be skeptical about a belief or a class of beliefs, but also about the rational justification for a belief or a class of beliefs. Thus skeptics divide into belief skeptics and justification skeptics. (See R. Fogelin, Walking the Tightrope of Reason, Oxford UP, 2003, 98) You can be one without the other. There are various combinatorially possible positions. Here are three of several interesting ones:

a) S doubts whether p is justified, but S does not doubt that p: he affirms that p.

b) S doubts whether p is justified, and in consequence doubts that p.

c) S doubts whether p is justified, and concludes that one ought to suspend judgment on p.

Ad (a). Suppose Tom canvasses the arguments for and against the existence of God and concludes that it's a wash: the arguments and considerations he is aware of balance and cancel out.  Tom finds himself in a state of evidential equipoise. As a result he doubts whether belief in God is justified.  But he decides to believe anyway.  In this example Tom does not doubt or deny that God exists; he affirms that God exists despite doubting whether the belief is rationally justified.  With respect to the existence of God, Tom is a justification skeptic but not a belief skeptic.

Ad (b). Like Tom, Tim doubts whether belief that God exists is justified. Unlike Tom, Tim transfers his doubt about the justification to the belief itself. Tim is both a justification skeptic and a belief skeptic.

Ad (c). And then there is Cliff. He thinks it is wrong always and everywhere and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence. Like Tim and Tom, he doubts whether the existence of God is justified and for the same reason: the arguments pro et contra balance and cancel.  He reasonably takes evidential equipoise as entailing that there is  insufficient evidence for either limb of a contradictory pair of theses. But, unlike Tom and Tim, Cliff infers a normative conclusion from his evidential equipoise: it is morally wrong, a violation of the ethics of belief, to believe that God exists given that the evidence is insufficient. 

For now I am concerned only with the rationality of doing as Tom does.  

Tom examines both sides of the question. He does his level best to be fair and balanced.  But he finds no argument or consideration to incline him one way or the other. Now it seems perfectly obvious to me that our man is free to believe anyway, that is, in our example either to affirm the existence of God or to reject the existence of God.  He is not psychologically compelled by his state of evidential equipoise to suspend belief.

But while Tom is free to affirm, would it be rational for him to affirm the existence of God? Yes, because for beings of our constitution it is prudentially (as opposed to theoretically) rational to believe beyond the evidence. Consider the case of

The Alpine Hiker

An avalanche has him stranded on a mountainside facing a chasm.  He cannot return the way he came, but if he stays where he is he dies of exposure.  His only hope is to jump the chasm.  The preponderance of evidence is that this is impossible: he has no epistemic reason to think that he can make the jump.  But our hiker knows that what one can do is in part determined by what one believes one can do, that "exertion generally follows belief," as Jeffrey Jordan puts it.  If the hiker can bring himself to believe that he can make the jump, then he increases his chances of making it.  "The point of the Alpine hiker case is that pragmatic belief-formation is sometimes both morally and intellectually permissible."

We should therefore admit that there are cases in which epistemic considerations are reasonably defeated by prudential considerations.

And now we come to the Big Questions.  Should I believe that I am libertarianly free?  That it matters how I live?  That something is at stake in life?  That I will in some way or other be held accountable after death for what I do and leave undone here below?  That God exists?  That I am more than a transient bag of chemical reactions?  That a Higher Life is possible? 

Not only do I not have evidence that entails answers to any of these questions, I probably do not have evidence that makes a given answer more probable than not.  Let us assume that it is not more probable than not that God exists and that (in consequence) it is not more probable than not that I have a higher destiny in communion with God.  

But here's the thing.  I have to believe that I have a higher destiny if I am to act so as to attain it.  It is like the situation with the new neighbors.  I have to believe that they are decent people if I am to act in such a way as to establish good relations with them.  Believing the best of them, even on little or no evidence, is pragmatically useful and prudentially rational. I have to believe beyond the evidence.  Similarly in the Alpine Hiker case.  He has to believe that he can make the jump if he is to have any chance of making it.  So even though it is epistemically irrational for him to believe he can make it on the basis of the available evidence, it is prudentially rational for him to bring himself to believe.  You could say that the leap of faith raises the probability of the leap of chasm.

What if he is wrong?  Then he dies.  But if he sits down in the snow in despair he also dies, and more slowly.  By believing beyond the evidence he lives his last moments better than he would have by giving up. He lives courageously and actively. He lives like a man.

Here we have a pragmatic argument that is not truth-sensitive: it doesn't matter whether he will fail or succeed in the jump.  Either way, he lives better here and now if he believes he can cross the chasm to safety.  And this, even though the belief is not supported by the evidence.

It is the same with God and the soul.  The pragmatic argument in favor of them is truth-insensitive: whether or not it is a good argument is independent of whether or not God and the soul are real.  For suppose I'm wrong.  I live my life under the aegis of God, freedom, and immortality, but then one day I die and become nothing.  I was just a bag of chemicals after all.  It was all just a big bloody joke.  Electrochemistry played me for a fool.  So what? 

What did I lose by being a believer? Nothing of any value.  Indeed, I have gained value since studies show that believers tend to be happier people.  But if I am right, then I have done what is necessary to enter into my higher destiny.  Either way I am better off than  without the belief in God and the soul.  If I am not better off in this life and the next, then I am better off in this life alone.

I am either right or wrong about God and the soul.  If I am right, and I live my beliefs, then then I have lived in a way that not only makes me happier here and now, but also fits me for my higher destiny.  If I am wrong, then I am simply happier here and now.

So how can I lose?  Even if they are illusions, believing in God and the soul incurs no costs and disbelieving brings no benefits. 

Addendum

Dave Bagwill hits me with a powerful objection, which I will put in my own way.

It may be that mere intellectual assent to propositions about God and the soul "incurs no costs." But how could that be true for those who live their faith?  There are plenty of examples of those whose lived faith has cost them their liberty, their livelihoods, and their lives.  As we speak, Christians are being driven from their homes and slaughtered in the Middle East by adherents of the 'religion of peace.'  

This is a good objection and at the very least forces me to qualify what I wrote, perhaps along the following lines: religious belief and practice incur no real costs for those of us fortunate to live in societies in which there is freedom of religion.

How long freedom of religion can last in the USA is a good question given the leftist assault on religious liberty. Yet another reason to battle the leftist scum.  Luckily, we now have a chance with Trump as president.  

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