November 26, 2009
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Patrick Shawhan and the Student Debate at Skepticon 2
Intro:
Patrick Shawhan was one of the theistic contributors to the student debate at Skepticon 2. We've recently become facebook friends and he messaged me some follow up questions he said he'd love me to answer.
Shawhan's first question:Do you think that evidentialism is the only appropriate method for evaluating and justifying propositions? (Or, why do you reject broad foundationalism?)My definition of "evidentialism" (or rather, just "evidence") is as wide as whatever you can present in terms of giving good reasons for believing in whatever is true. Even if we maintain some distinction between philosophical and logical evidence, the evidence of mind-only experiences (like dreams), and say forensic evidence, one could only imagine that theism would have a meaningful contribution to the most stereotypical and narrow definition of evidence in addition to other avenues. I know of no avenue theists pursue that I reject ideologically.
For instance it's logically possible to have a sensus divinitatis like a connection to the divine internet. But incidentally when we click on Google's webpage, even if our computer screens were only in our heads, we could easily cross check and confirm sufficiently that in fact we were having objective individual experiences of the same thing. We can't do that with theism and so it only has a rather vague contribution to this particular evidential pot. There are better explanations. Granted the shorthand if an atheist doesn't explain why they reject it can look like some kind of ideological shortchange, but that's just experience and laziness talking for many atheists. It's just that they are well aware that brand of evidence has been bad and they expect it to continue to be as bad. I don't think any of the atheists on either panel would be that close minded if simple cross checking tests could be applied to show a sensus divinitatis is real and actually does what theists claim it does.
In fact, it should be noted my entire case involved no physical evidence whatsoever, brought up the very issue of internal coherency, didn't even mention science, and so I don't see how it makes any sense to describe my point of view with labels like "evidentialism" or "scientism." I certainly have arguments along those lines as well, but I'm not dependent on them. In my view, a truly well rounded worldview takes everything into consideration and it's not all hinged on just one brand of evidence. Overall, it's more about abduction than coherency, but obviously coherency plays a part just like explicitly scientific evidence does. My question for you would be, why is it so necessary to saddle critical atheists with such terms whether they apply or not?
Shawhan's second question:Why do you believe that an entity outside the time-space continuum must be static? Is that of logical necessity?
Yes. I'm sure there could easily be other space-time continuums, but that's generally not what is being claimed on behalf of God. He's categorically "timeless" meaning he's not changing on any temporal axis. If you can't change, you are by logical necessity static. I really don't know what's so difficult about that. God, the Father can't do a single operation a mind does (other than exist) if he cannot go from one state to another. He can't "think" or "experience" anything and so there's just something we can call a coherent "mind." It doesn't even make sense to say that he began to create anything since that implies he's on a timeline where at one point he wasn't creating anything and then he was. A temporal axis is universal in the sense it has nothing necessarily to do with matter or physical laws. It describes change in the most generic sense possible. So there's no way to mystify that away. A timeless god is as good as an inanimate object.
It seems the more sophisticated philosophers have started rejecting the timeless god for less orthodox definitions (link), but I'm not sure I've ever met a grass roots theologian who believed God was constrained by time. And really, time is liberating. It allows you to do things. It's funny that it's seen as some kind of petty hang up "contingent beings" have.
Ben
Comments (7)
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Patrick here,
Very interesting comments. Thorough and well thought out. Thank
you.
A few things to clear up though:
I think we might agree more than I had previously realized on the subject of
epistemological justification. Here is my view in a nutshell:
There are basically two streams of thought on epistemological justification -
Narrow and Broad Foundationalism. (FYI, Narrow Foundationalism is synonymous
with Evidentialism) As far as I can tell, most professional philosophers
that have studied broad foundationalism tend to accept it. I know of none
that have studied it and rejected it. However, there are two plausible
reasons to reject narrow foundationalism. Narrow foundationalism says
that in order for a proposition to be epistemically justified, that proposition
must be evident to the senses, logically necessary (knowable a priori), or
incorrigible - or derived from a proposition that meets at least one of these
criteria. However, there are many propositions that perfectly rational
people believe that do not fit any of these criteria. For instance, I
believe I had a dream about football a few nights ago, I believe that other
people have minds, and I believe that the world continues to exist even while I
am asleep. None of these propositions necessarily fit any of the criteria
for narrow foundationalism. Moreover, the proposition "Narrow
Foundationalism is true" does not meet any of the criteria for narrow
foundationalism - so it is basically self refuting. Enter Broad
Foundationalism. I accept broad foundationalism in large part due to the
failure of narrow foundationalism, but also because it just makes sense to
me. Broad foundationalism suggests that a proposition's epistemic
justifiability cannot be determined simply on its own merit. So, rather
than establishing a set of criteria with which to judge a proposition, broad
foundationalism judges a proposition based on the coherence of the worldview of
which it is an integral part. If the worldview at large is coherent, then
the propositions that make up the worldview must be epistemically
justified. There are different ways to determine coherence, but basically
the worldview must be logically coherent, coherent with objective human
experience, coherent with subjective human experience (emotions, feelings,
thoughts, will, etc.), and coherent in practice (that is, it can be put into
practice in a coherent way). In short, all propositions are prima facie
epistemically justified, but judged later based on the coherence of the worldview
of which they are apart.
No, I am not saying that all atheists are narrow foundationalists.
However, anyone that tries to force a theist to provide evidence for the
existence of God so the belief in that existence may be epistemically justified
- that person is acting under a narrow foundationalist model.
FYI, according to the leading philosophers of science, science does NOT act
under an evidentialist model - logical positivism, scientism, narrow
foundationalism, etc. Science should be thought of as methodological
falsificationism - which actually looks a lot more like broad foundationalism.
Moreover, broad foundationalism is NOT a strictly Christian method of
epistemological justification. Its roots
are purely philosophical. The
philosophers that debunked logical positivism may or may not have been
Christians. The same is true of the
philosophers that debunked scientism and scientific dogmatism in favor of
methodological falsificationism.
Last thought:
What you have to say about God being timeless is very interesting.
Obviously if time is just a measure of the rate of change, then anything that
experiences or changes must be on a temporal axis. I will revise the way
I talk about God now to say that He is on His own temporal axis - totally
distinct from ours. However, though He exists on His own temporal axis,
He is free to manipulate all other space-time continuums, moving freely inside
and outside of them, omnipresent within them at every moment.
@Patrick Shawhan - opps, apparently Xanga does not like copy/paste from a WORD document. Sorry about that.
@Patrick Shawhan - Hey Patrick,
I'm not sure we really disagree about much on the issues you've brought up. Given your examples, I am curious as to why memory (dreams), abduction (minds), and inference (object constancy) are off limits for what you call evidentialism.
I'm especially perplexed as to why the internal sense is not evidence? The five senses are just as faulty as the mind's eye on itself. We have to use all our faculties to cross check the input we get from everywhere cuz in our experience everything is subject to many sorts of errors. So it seems a little weird to eliminate introspection from the domain of evidence. Maybe that still doesn't cover everything, but it should cover more than you appear to give it credit.
I'm also curious why the supposed tug of war between evidentialism and broad foundationalism gets brought up in a debate on God if the later is not explicitly aimed at justifying some kind of proof of God. You have to be going somewhere with it, or it's just a HUGE red herring that took up quite a bit of time in the two debates. The two reasons I'm familiar with that theists "go there" is because A: They think thoughts are magic. And B: They think atheists reject internal experiences of God just because they are internal. "I don't care what's happening in your head, give me evidence instead."
The first is an actual proposition that needs to be defended and not asserted. Are thoughts immaterial? Or are they mechanical? Either party in the debate needs to defend one perspective or the other. There's no need to dig deep into philosophical methodology. You just need to prove that thoughts are magic. As far as I know, that's just as much a cliche' evidential question as any other.
On the second, it seems to me, that theists take imprecise skeptical rhetoric too literally. I'm sure every evidentialist thinks internal experiences are evidence of something. Just not particularly good evidence especially in a world filled with religious people who have just as good of mental evidence for their religion. And it's easy to test this theory by asking die hard evidentialists if they believe it is logically possible to have a divine internet connection in their head. I'll bet just about all of them will say, "Sure, but that doesn't mean we can't test the connection for objectivity since it's also logically possible people are mistaken." I mean, if we only got Google in our heads, it seems we could easily ask each other probing questions to test and see if we had the same Google page. Again, that's just as much a cliche' evidential question as any other (and the debate would be taken to where the debate already is for most atheists). And again, there's no particular reason to get into a philosophy lesson in the middle of a debate about God.
Even if evidentialists are ideologically inconsistent in exactly the way you claim they are, I'll bet if you could prove thoughts are magic or that theists really do have a divine modem in their heads, you would convert them rather than confuse them. Perhaps you had a different agenda though. I'm just curious what it was (or if I just missed it).
In regards to a timeless deity, it is possible to define a version of God apart from the three arguments I brought up in the debate, who is physical, exists on a timeline, and who isn't the most moral entity possible. I imagine the philosophical Christianity of the future, if it is to survive, will start looking more and more like that as far as professional theologians go. Vox Day, author of "The Irrational Atheist" seems to already be there. And deities like that are not as refutable as much as the circular square versions are. I don't have a problem with that, since agnosticism and apatheism will do. But incidentally my approach is broadsiding the majority view, so that's why I offered it. If that's made your worldview that much more coherent, more power to you! hehe I won't complain.
Ben
Okay, now we are getting somewhere.
On broad vs narrow foundationalism and "evidence":
According to standard narrow foundationalism, "evidence" must be objectively verifiable. Subjective experiences are not objectively verifiable, which is why they do not normally count as evidence.
This could easily make one think that I brought up the distinction between narrow and broad foundationalism in order that subjective experiences could be counted as evidence. However, this is absolutely not the case. The shift toward broad foundationalism is not so much a methodology shift as it is a paradigm shift. The broad foundationalist - such as myself - would say that the existence of God (like any other proposition) does not need objectively verifiable "evidence" corroborating it in order that it may be epistemologically justifiable. Rather, "reasons" of a totally different kind should be provided. ("Reasons" and "evidence" are not synonymous.) The only kind of "reason" that is necessary for a proposition to be epistemically justifiable is the kind that demonstrates that the proposition is a necessary component of a coherent worldview. Thus, the point in making the distinction between narrow and broad foundationalism is so that a proposition may be defended by the coherence of the worldview of which it is a part, rather than distinct, objective, verifiable evidence.
In short, I defend my belief in the existence of God by demonstrating the coherence of the Christian worldview, rather than providing objectively verifiable evidence corroborating His existence (because the methodology of evidentialism has been shown inconsistent).
Moreover, I would suggest that most everyone, whether they realize it or not, uses the broad foundationalist methodology for basically all beliefs. Thus it would be inconsistent to demand that Christianity conform to a methodology not used for other propositions.
Broad foundationalism is distinguished from narrow foundationalism to define a better methodology with which to defend belief in a proposition, and redirect evaluation away from a singular proposition and onto the worldview as a whole.
That is why in the debate I tried to focus on the coherence of theism compared to the incoherence of naturalism, rather than focusing on the basic question "Does God exist?".
One last thought: I was hesitant to accept JT's invitation to be part of the debate for some of the very reasons you have brought up. The question "Does God exist?" is an evidentialist question, and I knew that if I were to present my views in the debate it would seem like a huge red herring. I articulated these thoughts to JT, but he encouraged me to be part of the debate anyway. I never meant to confuse anybody, but five minutes is a really short amount of time to articulate a paradigmatic shift in philosophy and explain a different way to evaluate propositions.
@Patrick Shawhan - I still don't understand why broad foundationalism has to be either all introspective evidence or external "objective" evidence? Why not a healthy combination of the two? You accept scientific evidence for lots of other things, right? You aren't anti-evidence. If you lived in a world where the scientific consensus on the efficacy of prayer, the reality of witchcraft and demon possession, the existence of a soul that can survive death and even possibly have out of body experiences that could be verified, and a list of other supernatural evidential Biblically endorsed claims*, I think you would easily see things the way I do. The problem is that's not the world we live in and it gets suspicious when there is an over-focus on a particularly willy-nilly brand of internal self justifying evidence as though there would be something inherently wrong with having really good evidential proof of the Christian worldview. You do seem to be quite blatantly ruling it out ideologically and I seriously question that.
*Obviously we wouldn't have to have the very best proof for ALL of the laundry list of possible supernatural claims the Bible endorses, but just a few good case studies on some of them would suffice.
All you seem to be saying is that the theist's internal experience of God is compatible with the rest of the Christian worldview. And at face value, that's ironically not even a controversial point. Somehow though the internal evidence is the main proof of God's existence though that convinces the thoughtful Christian that God exists. You haven't touched any of my cross checking points, which is also confusing. Even if we only had internal evidence, we could still have appropriately high standards to confirm we are not deceiving ourselves like the religious people of other religions must be doing. Don't you want to know that it's really God and not just self deception or mistaken identity of some sort? Internal coherency is not the only test of a worldview. It should neither be excluded nor blown out of proportion. Surely you are aware there are coherent and false worldviews out there that are not Christianity, correct? We could invent some right now.
Subjective experiences may not be objectively verifiable in a strict sense at the moment, but we only do objective verification through the eyes of subjective experiences. In other words, if we reject subjective experiences, we reject objective ones as well. Further, in principle, and by extension we are all verifying the subjective internal claims of others. "I have memories." "I do, too." "I do, too." "I do, too." We may not have the exact same memories (even though sometimes we have very similar memories of the same events), but objectivity was never a squeaky clean category to begin with as I've explained. How different is it that we can all verify that humans can have memories than everyone can check what's in the shoebox? It might not be as objective, but the distinction between the objective and subjective is always blurred. And this means that even so called subjective experiences can be verified to some extent in concept at the very least. And perhaps someday we will have the technology to do much better than that where we can actually take memories (for example) out of one person's brain and download them into another person's brain. I see no reason in principle why the experience files of what Christians are calling God couldn't be copied and pasted as well.
If you are going to claim "broad foundationalism" I'm going to have to invent a new term for myself to encompass a more sophisticated view that deals with all the angles here.
Ben
Interesting.
Some how I think I managed to totally confuse you.
Let me try this again.
Narrow foundationalism suggests that in order for a worldview to be rational every proposition that makes up that worldview must be self-evident, evident to the senses, incorrigible, or derived from a proposition that does meet one of those criteria.
Broad foundationalism suggests that in order for a worldview to be rational the worldview itself must be coherent according to reason, objective experience, subjective experience, and practice.
Broad foundationalism also suggests that in order for a proposition to be rational that proposition must be a necessary part of a coherent worldview.
You have said, "Internal coherency is not the only test of a worldview. It should neither be excluded nor blown out of proportion." Notice that is basically what I am saying. Internal coherency is not the only test of a worldview according to broad foundationalism. There is also external coherency - objective experience and practice (can this worldview be honestly put into practice?).
You have said, "Surely you are aware there are coherent and
false worldviews out there that are not Christianity, correct? We
could invent some right now." Of course there are other worldviews out there that are basically coherent. However, broad foundationalism would suggest that worldviews can be more or less coherent, and that the most coherent worldview is the most epistemologically justified worldview. There is a sort of sliding scale for coherency, rather than a simple coherent vs incoherent.
You have said, "All you seem to be saying is that the
theist's internal experience of God is compatible with the rest of the
Christian worldview." That is almost exactly what I am saying, but not quite. I am saying that I believe that God exists primarily because the proposition "God exists" is a fundamental part of the Christian worldview - which I see as the most coherent worldview available. I AM NOT trying to provide evidence for God's existence from internal experience or anything like that. I am simply saying that the Christian worldview as a whole makes sense of every aspect of reality, thus I believe all propositions that are fundamental to Christianity.
Indeed, broad foundationalism is concerned with internal experiences far more than narrow foundationalism, but remember, broad foundationalism is not interested in testing specific propositions except to see if they are necessary pieces of a worldview. Broad foundationalism is interested in testing worldviews as a whole - comparing worldviews and determining which seems more coherent.
Moreover, the philosophy of science has progressed to the point that it has rejected the narrow foundationalist mantra. Instead it has taken up the banner of methodological falsificationism. Methodological falsificationism is exactly what science looks like in a broad foundationalism model of knowledge - rejecting dogmatism, pure objectivity, and the ability of inductive reasoning to approach absolute truth.
I think you are probably also a broad foundationalist. Of course that does not mean you are any less of an atheist that Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or JT. It just means that you are leaning towards a big-picture approach to knowledge and rejecting dogmatism, pure objectivity, and the ability of inductive reasoning to approach absolute truth. Broad foundationalism is an epistemological methodology - not a Christian invention to rationalize faith. You would probably try to argue that naturalism is more coherent than any brand of supernaturalism - thus, in the debate I tried to present arguments against the coherency of naturalism and in favor of the coherency of supernaturalism. Undoubtedly there are arguments that can be presented contrary to mine.
Basically, I think the point is that it is irrational and improper epistemological methodology to demand theists to provide "evidence" for the existence of God. I also think you already know this, because you would probably say that it is irrational and improper epistemological methodology for a theist to demand an atheist to provide "evidence" against the existence of God. Propositions should not be evaluated in isolation. They should be evaluated based on the coherency of the worldview of which they are a part.
"I still don't understand why broad
foundationalism has to be either all introspective evidence or external
"objective" evidence? Why not a healthy combination of the two?" Broad foundationalism IS A HEALTHY COMBINATION OF THE TWO! Narrow foundationalism NOT.
Is it starting to make any more sense?
@Patrick Shawhan - Yeah, I think my problem was that I equivocated on the term "derived." I was thinking derived could mean inferentially derived, but it appears that narrow foundationalism means deductively derived. The term "derive" isn't always used in a rigid way. That's my bad.
Ben
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