Peter Boghossian, Faith, and Religious Epistemology

I've recently finished Peter Boghossian's book "A Manual for Creating Atheists".  I listened to it on Audiobook, which helped immensely with being able to get through the book with the way my life is going right now between my work levels and trying to be a father and husband at home.  I can listen while doing mundane tasks at work and while doing chores/exercise/commuting.  If anyone can recommend good intellectual atheist books on Audible I'd be appreciative.

If you've been following my blog, you'll have seen my last post on Faith as "Belief without Evidence" where I engaged Tom Gilson of ThinkingChristian.net and his argument about that not being a valid definition of the word as Christians understand it.

I realize now that my post and approach was a mistake. There's no point in trying to show how the the Christian bible could be read to support Boghossian's definition.  You're playing the interpretation game which is going to be subjective and the Christians will almost always have a way to interpret their way out of hairy passages.

Eventually though, as I got through A Manual for Creating Atheists and thinking on the common thread of responses to it from Christian Apologists Tom and Phil Vischer, I realized something rather important.

The Definition of Faith is A Giant Red Herring

It honestly doesn't matter one iota to Boghossian's central argument in "A Manual for Creating Atheists" whether or not faith is defined as "Belief without good evidence" or as apologists would have it "Trusting in what one already knows to be true".

Boghossian first and foremost attacks religious epistemology.  With the responses apologists have put forward, you would think "A Manual for Creating Atheists" consisted of Boghossian defining faith as "belief without evidence" or "pretending to know what you don't know", explaining how that's obviously a bad thing, and then it's simply "checkmate theists!"

That's not at all what he does, he goes through all the different examples of ways believers, primarily Christians, claim that they can "know" their religion is true.  He takes us through the reasons why it's problematic, and even touches on more advanced topics in epistemology such as coherence theory of truth.

So when we atheists get hung up debating the definition of faith we're distracting from the main point of Boghossian's argument: that religious epistemology is unreliable at best.  His book highlights ways that we can show this to believers in conversations or as he calls them interventions.

It doesn't matter if we use the word faith as a synonym for religious epistemology, or if we use the apologists preferred definition. This is because even on their definition they talk about things they already "know to be true".   All their definition of faith does is push the problem back a step, the important bit is how do they know that Christianity is true?

Answers on that question have already been given, at least partially when it came to the massive comment threads that followed the posts on various blogs on this topic.

There were two major categories given that I want to address briefly: Historical Evidence of the Gospels and Alvin Plantinga's "Reformed Epistemology".

The Argument from the Resurrection

There is a ton of good counter apologetics on the argument from the resurrection or more specifically the historical reliability of the gospel accounts.  I recommend watching the debate between Bart Ehrman and William Lane Craig, as well as this lecture (Part 1 and Part 2) by Dr. Hector Avalos.  Richard Carrier's analogy to the Hero Savior of Vietnam is also a very good read.  That said there are a few things that we need to keep in mind:

No matter what apologists say, history does not support the idea that Jesus rose from the dead.

I can't emphasize the word history enough, because it means something very specific.  The historical method doesn't support the idea that Jesus rose from the dead, and it doesn't do so for a few very good reasons:

• We interpret historical accounts based on what know happens today.
•  History tells us what probably happened.
• We can not calculate the probability of a resurrection miracle without knowing two things:
• The probability that a god exists
• The probability that a god (if it exists) would be interested in raising a first century Jewish failed apocalyptic prophet from the dead

Pay close attention the next time you read or listen to an apologist give the argument from the resurrection - it's always about what "biblical scholars" think are solid facts to be gleaned from the gospels, not what "historians" think are solid facts to be gleaned from the gospels. 

This is because history follows the criteria above, and given the world we live in we know:

1. The probability that god exists is low or inscrutable (ie. arguments from natural theology aren't conclusive).

2. Even if a god existed we have no way to glean what its motivations would be, and many religions claim that this being has performed various miracles that testify to the truth of their religion.

3. Despite whether or not a god acted in a way in the past it seems very clear that it is no longer active today as many religious texts claim it was active in the past.  In fact we have very good inductive evidence that many miracle claims tend to be perfectly natural occurrences.  

Note we don't even have to get into augments about how reliable the gospels are in terms of how far they were written from the events, who they were written by, or whether or not testimony is a reliable way to gain knowledge.

That last bit is key, since that argument comes up a lot and the immediate undercutting defeater is that while testimony can be considered reliable it is generally not considered reliable when the testimony violates our background knowledge.  When it does that, we need at least different, preferably better, evidence.

This can be demonstrated immediately.  If I told you I watched TV with my wife last night then you'd probably believe me, even though if your'e reading this you don't really know me personally.  But if I told you that last night my wife and I took a quick trip to the surface of the moon you'd be pretty sure I was lying.

This is because a couple watching TV together at night is something that's within your background knowledge. Conversely people being able to get to the surface of the moon and back in one night goes against quite a bit of your background knowledge.

This is the objective, consistent method that history rejects miracle and paranormal claims that lead to contradictions, such as multiple exclusionary religions being true.  This is why whether or not the gospels were actually written by supposed eye witnesses doesn't matter (they probably weren't).  We have multiple, independent, even living eye witnesses to the miracles of Sathya Sai Babba.  We have multiple independent witnesses to the miracles of Joseph Smith.  History rejects those claims for the reasons I've outlined above, and so it also rejects the miracles of Jesus.

The key here is that the historical method doesn't support the idea that Jesus rose from the dead, pretty much on the basis that the prior probability is too low.

A Brief Aside on Begging the Question

Many apologists are keen to object here and say that even if this is the case, then using the historical method to evaluate the claims of the gospels is begging the question.  I'm going to explain why that's not the case.

Notice none of what I've written says that miracles are impossible, or even that we could not know that specific miracles occurred in the past on the basis of testimony in principle. 

Note the emphasis on "in principle".  It just so happens that in our actual world we currently can't know if a specific miracle happened on the basis of historical testimony because the prior probability is going to be too low.  However, if a god exists then it doesn't necessarily have to be this way. 

The reason we can't know if a miracle occurred is because everything we know about the world is that it works in a particular way, according to what we call the laws of nature.  It would be begging the question to say that those laws couldn't be violated, but we don't need to say that. All we need is the immense amount of inductive evidence we have of the laws of nature working combined with the fact that every empirical investigation of miracle/paranormal claims turning out to have naturalistic explanations.

So if we have historical claims of miracles, especially from the time before science transformed our understanding of the world - they probably were fabrications or a misunderstanding of things that actually occurred, much like today.

So how isn't this begging the question? Because if a god exists, then the world doesn't have to be this way.  We could have instances where Christians, and only Christians, could perform very minor miracles. 

Let’s go with a common one: the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation. This is where the communion wafer and wine are supposed to transform into the literal body and blood of Jesus Christ.  But rather than the unfalsifiable claims Catholics make about this "miracle" today, it could be detectable, and happen outside of the body. 

Imagine if you would, if every priest in every mass was able to perform some ritual and have bread and wine turn into flesh and blood.  Imagine that this has happened for two thousand years, and after the introduction of science we were able to identify that no matter where and when it happens that it's always the same DNA in the flesh and blood on the alter.

In this case, we would have strong inductive evidence that Christians can perform things that violate the laws of nature as we understand them. It could be done in controlled conditions, and be as well established empirically as we establish anything in science empirically.

That would give the historical method enough to raise the prior probability and allow it to conclude that the miracle claims of the gospel accounts were true yet still reject the miracle claims of other contradictory religions both ancient and contemporary.

Reformed Epistemology and the Sensus Divinitatus

Once we take history off the table of evidence, in fact when we systematically take down all the various arguments from Natural Theology off the table, apologists have one last trick up their sleeve - Declare that they don't need any evidence and that belief in god and their specific religion is "properly basic".

There's quite a bit I want to write on Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology and the Sensus Divinitatus specifically, but basically what it means is this:

There are certain fundamental things we can't really appeal to evidentially in order to truly answer the question about: 

• The existence of the external world
• The existence of other minds besides our own.

This is effectively one of the bedrock problems in epistemology, since it's effectively how do we show that solipsism is false.  The problem is that there is no non-question begging answer to the question of solipsism.

Rather than see this as an epistemological black hole, Alvin Plantinga saw ripe soil to hide god in.

Effectively Reformed Epistemology boils down to this:

1. There could be something called the sensus divinitatus, or a sense of the divine

a.    The sensus divinitatus is either not functioning in atheists, or they're lying when they say they don't have it

2. The sensus divinitatus is direct experience of god in a different way than our other senses.  It reveals that god exists and that the claims of our religion are true.

3. Just as we axiomatically regard our senses as generally reliable, so too can theists regard the sensus divinitatus as reliable so long as there are no undercutting defeaters. 

a.    Thus just as we have warrant to believe that the apple is red when we see it, even though we could be perceiving things incorrectly theists have warrant to believe their god exists and their dogmas are true

4. The only undercutting defeater of a potential properly basic belief is to show a logical contradiction in that belief.

Smells like bullshit? Yep. 

But this is their defence, the ultimate trump card.  In fact here's a video where William Lane Craig says that wholly apart from any evidence, this is the way he knows Christianity is true (he calls it the "inner witness of the Holy Spirit").

Basically it boils down to the claim that a believer just knows god exists and their religion is true via divine revelation and you silly atheists can't prove they're wrong!

Much like the problem of solipsism in epistemology, there is no non-question begging response to this assertion. Tom Gilson even used the nice rhetorical trick that if we atheists say the Christian doesn't have a sensus divinitatus then we're doing the dreaded: "Pretending to know what we don't know" which he (rightly!) regards as "not a correct definition of faith" and "a really bad thing to do". 

There are a few problems here, and I hope to write more on this in the future, but I'll touch on the key points:

The sensus divinitatus or rather “subjective religious experience” is demonstrably an unreliable way of knowing things are true.

This is because even Plantinga admits that the defence of the sensus divinitatus works for almost every single non-contradictory religion out there. Muslims use it, Mormons famously use it (they call it a "burning in the bosom"), and so on.  Peter Boghossian specifically addresses this in "A Manual for Creating Atheists" as instances where believers say "I just know in my heart that it's true."

What’s worse is just like the atheist can't say the Christian doesn't have one, so too the Christian cannot say the Muslim/Mormon/Hindu/etc does not experience the same thing. 

In fact it gets worse when it comes to atheists, since Christianity does claim that if someone honestly seeks god with their heart, he will reveal himself.  Many atheists claim to want to know if god exists and prayed fervently for such a sign, yet they didn't receive it. I'm one of them. 

The only thing Christians can do in response to beg the question and pretend to know what they don't know, and say that well we really must not honestly seek god with all our heart, because otherwise we'd have it.  Effectively they call us liars.

The Atheist Stands Supreme

Faced with this problem, the atheist stands in the unique position with regards to this extraordinary claim.  While the claim of the sensus divinitatus is ultimately unfalsifiable, we can evaluate all the claims and come to an inductive conclusion about whether or not it's probably true or not.

The atheist doesn't have to call any religious person who claims a sensus divinitatus a liar. We accept that they feel or experience something.  However we point out that their claims lead to contradictory conclusions, and that we lack such experiences.  We can also show that religious belief and subsequent claims of the sensus divinitatus follows geographic distributions.  Basically if you grow up in a Muslim country, chances are you'll be a Muslim and have an Islamic SD, if you grow up in a Christian country, you'll have the Christian SD.  So it is with the Hindu's, the Mormon's, etc.

We also know from psychology that humans have overactive agency detection - that is we attribute agents to events or experiences where there are no agents around.

To recap: we know that not all of the SD can be true, the fact that we know we have overactive agency detection in even non-religious situations and the fact that religious belief/SD claims follow geographic locations. This leads us to believe that SD claims are most likely just psychological re-enforcement of religious beliefs. 

The atheistic explanation is the only one that can explain the different experiences and lack of experiences in a way that's consistent, or doesn't push the problem back a step like the theistic solution of devils or demons causing false SD experiences.

There's a lot more I can say here, but ultimately it can be shown that in terms of religious epistemology, the sensus divinitatus is going to fall short as a reliable way to know things.

A final defence of Peter Boghossian's definition of faith

I'd like to remind readers that at no time in this did the definition of "faith" come into play.  It's always about religious epistemology, or "how you know your specific religious claims are true".

Why then does Boghossian spend so much time on defining faith in the way he does? Why bother?  Because it's accurate when the word "faith" is used today in a religious context.

The reason is that even if what Gilson and other apologists say is true, when we use the word faith today in a religious context, it's always connected specifically to religious facts we know.  Remember as Gilson would define it faith is best understood as "Trusting in what one already knows to be true".

So if Boghossian shows there is an inescapable problem with religious epistemology then the apologist’s definition of faith is going to be tainted by that fact.

To be clear let me end with parsing Gilson's definition combined with Boghossian's central argument against religious epistemology:

Christian faith would be "Trusting in what I know to be true about the claims of the Christian religion".  Boghossian shows that one cannot have a reliable method to discern religious truth, so substituting that in for Gilson's definition we get:

"Trusting in what I cannot know to be true about the claims of the Christian religion" which is just a longer way of saying that "Faith is belief without good evidence".