Do babies come into this world with a natural tendency to tell right from wrong, or is their stance entirely informed by social conditioning? Or is it both?

I’ve blogged in the past on ethical intuitionism, and I had some favourable things to say about it. Properly functioning people under the right sorts of conditions, I maintain, have a (fallible) tendency to form true moral beliefs. I also blogged recently about the fact that children, in the course of healthy, normal development without extraordinary intervention, naturally form belief in God.

What about healthy babies and moral beliefs? Do they naturally form true moral beliefs, or is it all a matter of social conditioning and etiquette? Well, I’ve already answered that question by supporting ethical intuitionism. If that’s a plausible view on true moral belief formation in general, then it will be true of everyone as they develop into a competent knower. But is there any scientific evidence that very young children and babies actually do naturally form (what many of us would take to be) true moral beliefs?
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This episode asks the question: “What is Faith”? Is it, as some maintain, just believing things for no good reason? When Christian thinkers over the years have spoken of having faith, what have they been talking about? Listen and find out!

At the end of this episode I ask listeners if they have any suggestions for scholars that I might interview in future episodes. Be sure to speak up if you have any ideas!

Episode 044: What is Faith? [ 58:30 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A conversation I had the other day reminded me of what is now a rather old argument in relation to the question of belief in God (old in terms of twentieth century arguments anyway). Essentially, the issue was this: If my purported experience of knowing God / knowing that God exists via some sort of intuition or any other sort of experience should count as a reason for me to believe in God, then why can’t somebody else’s atheist experience (or at least their testimony of it) count as a reason for me to not believe in God? I say that I have a direct knowledge of God’s existence (let’s say I do). But what about someone who has direct, intuitive knowledge of something like “there is nothing out there, there is no purpose at all to life”? Surely, it was suggested to me, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
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In the “nuts and bolts” series, I explain and discuss some of the fundamental ideas in philosophy (and theology sometimes) that are taken for granted within the discipline, but which might not be very well known to ordinary human beings. This time the subject is ethical intuitionism (or moral intuitionism).

Firstly, and this cannot be emphasised strongly enough, moral intuitionism is not and has never been a theory about how moral facts are grounded. It is not a meta-ethical theory and it is not an ethical theory. It does not try to explain what makes anything right or wrong, nor does it try to tell us which particular actions are right and which are wrong. If you ever hear someone say “so your intuitions tell you that it’s wrong. That doesn’t make it wrong!” then you have my permission to do something unpleasant to them. Moral intuitionism is not meant to be about what makes things wrong – or right.

So if it’s not a theory of morality, what is it? Moral intuitionism is a moral epistemology. It is no more and no less than a theory about how we can come to know certain things, in this case certain moral facts. We can know them, according to this theory, by intuiting them, by experiencing the intuition that they are true.
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Nick “The Slasher” McGurk was found guilty of no fewer than nine counts of first-degree murder. A jury took just ten minutes to reach a unanimous guilty verdict. The case was open and shut. The judge donned his black cap and passed sentence: “Nicholas James McGurk, the court sentences you to death by hanging. Your sentence shall be carried out on a weekday next week in a turn of events that meets the following description: You are to be taken from your cell at midday to be hanged, but you will not know the day of your execution until the executioner knocks on your door on that that fateful day. That moment shall come as a thief in the night, in a most unpleasant surprise.”

Staring death in the face, Nick was in despair. He was led back to his cell where he would await that dreadful knock at the door. It was Friday afternoon. In the wee hours of that night, the Slasher couldn’t sleep. He had the following conversation with himself:
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The latest episode of the Unbelievable? radio show is out this weekend. This time it features a discussion between me and Arif Ahmed, an atheist from the University of Cambridge.

We were discussing the moral argument for theism. The discussion was certainly interesting enough, although it was divided up so as to fit into the show’s schedule. It wasn’t structured like a formal debate, so we didn’t get to respond in depth to each comment that we might have liked to. Both of us remarked after we had recorded the show that we could have gone on for a couple more hours unpacking the material that we had briefly touched on. Well, we couldn’t do that, but I have a loaded blog and I’m not afraid to use it.
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In the last podcast episode on Plantinga and properly basic beliefs, I briefly discussed the “Great Pumpkin Objection.” As it’s a subject worthy of a blog post of its own, and given that I know some people prefer things in writing, I thought I’d add a blog entry focused on that objection.

Alvin Plantinga has hammered out and defended the notion that if God (the Christian God that he believes in) really exists, then a Christian’s belief in God can be construed as properly basic. A properly basic belief is one that is rationally held and yet not derived from other beliefs that one holds (this is another way of saying that it is not justified by what is often called evidence). We hold many such beliefs, for example, the belief that the universe was not created just five minutes ago, any beliefs based on memory, belief that other minds exist, the belief that we are experiencing a certain colour, and so on. Set aside, for now, the fact that a lot of Christians think that they can produce decent evidence for the existence of God. Plantinga argued – successfully in my view – that even if that’s true, theism can be construed as properly basic and hence suitably justified even without such evidence. God created us in such a way that when we function properly we believe in him. The normal epistemic response to creation is to believe things like “God created this,” or more fundamentally, “God is real.” For more details, check out the podcast episode.

One bandwagon that anti-theists have jumped on is to claim that if theists can claim that their belief in God is basic, then just anybody at all can do this in regard to their belief in just anything. Here’s one popular version of that objection: In the comic strip Peanuts, the character Linus believes that there exists a Great Pumpkin who rises from the pumpkin patch every Halloween and rewards good children with presents. If Christians get to think that belief in God can be properly basic, then why couldn’t a person (like Linus) think that belief in the Great Pumpkin is properly basic, and so claim the right to believe it even though he cannot produce evidence for the belief’s truth?
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Here’s episode 36, in honour of the recent retirement of Alvin Plantinga as the John O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. It’s sort of a “nuts and bolts” podcast episode on Alvin Plantinga, introducing the listener to his account of belief in God as a properly basic belief – a belief justifiably held, but not held on the basis of evidence or argument.

Enjoy.

Episode 036: Plantinga and properly basic beliefs [ 55:27 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Christian apologists (and Christians in general) have noted from time to time that there is an important difference between being able to know that God is real and being able to show that God is real. You can do the former without doing the latter.

Christians have sometimes spoken about our ability to know that God is real in terms of the “inner witness” of the Holy Spirit, whereby God directly gives believers an assurance of God’s closeness to them. If any believer has this assurance, then s/he will have a confidence in God that is independent of her ability to construct an argument to satisfy another person that he belief in God is well founded. William Lane Craig, for example, often notes in his debates about the existence of God that numerous people claim to know God in this way because of the “inner witness” of the Spirit. Approaching the same claim from a different angle, Alvin Plantinga has carefully developed the claim that belief in God can (provided it is true) be properly basic, in this case grounded in claims that a person is not able to truthfully deny, formed by the right type of experiences (it’s a little more qualified than that, but this will do for now).

The (as yet) unnamed author of the “Thoughts of the Foetus” blog doesn’t think that the inner witness, even if real, can grant the kind of confidence or comfort that believers say it can. here’s why:

I would just like to point out that it is not nearly as comforting as Bill Craig seems to think. For example, in a popular youtube video circulating starring Bill, he claims this “inner witness” offers peace to a doubting Christian, because it grounds the certainty of his faith in something wholey apart from complicated philosophical arguments. But this simply isn’t true, because the “holy spirit epistemology” itself is a philosophical thesis that must be somehow rationally defended. If this were not so, then why does Craig devote nearly a whole chaper in “Reasonable Faith” and an entire “Reasonable Faith” podcast to doing just this?

The writer finished of that blog entry saying “Anyone want to defend Craig here?” I posted a reply at that blog earlier today but it hasn’t appeared yet. I’m sure it will, but I wanted to share it with readers here as well. It went like this:

Your objection is that the “inner witness” is no comfort because, in order to defend the claim that there exists an inner witness to another person, ‘the “holy spirit epistemology” itself is a philosophical thesis that must be somehow rationally defended.’

You need to explain why you use the word “must.” It must be rationally defended in order for… for what? The possibility of an experience need not be defended before the experience can be had, obviously (e.g. I don’t need to defend the scientific thesis that my eyes provide reliable information about the outside world before I can have confidence in what i see). So you need to mean that before I can have confidence in the certainty provided by the inner witness, I must be able to rationally defend to another person the claim that the inner witness is possible, or that basic beliefs can be formed in this way.

But this is clearly a false assessment. If – as a matter of fact – basic beliefs about God can be formed in the way that Plantinga suggests, or God can be experienced in the way that Christians maintain, then this phenomenon itself provides confidence. Why would that confidence only apply to people with enough philosophical nous to explain the epistemological implications?

Certainly, the thesis that such an internal witness can exist needs to be defended if one wishes to persuade philosophical skeptics that it exists. But in order to *have* the confidence Craig speaks of there is certainly no need to formulate such a defense.

Before anyone needs to defend Craig, I think you’d need to first build up a robust, plausible argument for the requirement that you claim exists.

Glenn Peoples

When he was presented with the accused man Jesus of Nazareth, the governer Pontius Pilate asked a question laden with philosophical importance: “What is truth?” It’s a question that I think was adequately answered centuries earlier by Plato: “The essence of truth is to say of what is that it is, and to say of what is not that it is not.” In normal english, the essence of truth-telling is to tell it like it really is.

In this edition of the nuts and bolts ( a series in which I cover the fundamentals of philosophy and later, theology), I won’t be wading through theories of truth. What I am going to do, prompted by a recent conversation, is to discuss the distinction between two different kinds of truths: analytic and synthetic. It might sound a bit artificial at first to talk about distinguishing between different sorts of truth. Some statements are true, and some are not. Right? Bear with me.

Here’s a list of statements that is true: 1) Write now Glenn is typing up a blog post about truth, 2) I just had a mochaccino, 3) Everything is the same as itself, 4) our van is blue, 5) a square has four sides, 6) 4 + 4 = 8. To say that the statements are true is to say that they correspond to the facts. However, this list consists of two different sorts of claims, and each type is true for different reasons.

Look at statements 1, 2 and 4. They are true because of how the facts just happened to be. Things could have been different. Things could have turned out so that I typed this blog post tomorrow, or an hour earlier than right now. I might not have had a mochaccino – I could have had a hot chocolate, or just a glass of water, but I happened to have a  mochaccino. Our car could easily have been painted a different colour. The facts just played out in such a way that these claims are true, but things could easily have been different. These claims are called “synthetic” claims, because they bring things together in a kind of synthesis. Take statement four. It brings together the idea of our van and also the idea of blueness. These two things don’t necessarily belong together, but just because of the facts as they are, these things have come together in the fact that our van is blue, and so the ideas are brought together in this statement. All synthetic truths are like this. For example the statement “rape is wrong” brings together the idea of rape and the idea of wrongness. “Microsoft Windows sucks” brings together an operating system and the quality of being suckful. Or think of more philosophical contexts. Imagine that someone has just presented an argument that you think is  fallacious. Saying “that argument is fallacious” or “that conclusion does not follow” (which is the same as saying “your argument is invalid”) would also be a synthetic statement, bringing together her argument or premise, and the concept of being fallacious or invalid.

Now look at statements 3, 5 and 6. They’re also true, but not for the same reason. True, they also line up with the facts, but they don’t just happen to line up with the facts. In fact the facts could not possibly have been any other way in these cases. Look at statement 5. Yes a square does, in fact, have four sides, but that’s because in order for something to be a square it must have four sides. Having four sides is part of the very definition of being square. Stated differently, there is no possible world in which statement 5 is false. The same is true of statements 3 and 6. Everything is the same as itself, because if at any given point in time, something is different from object x, then that thing is not object x but a different object. Likewise, there will never be a time when things change so that 4 plus 4 equals something other than 8. Statements like these are not synthetic, they are “analytic.” This is because they don’t bring two different ideas together. Look again at the statement about squares having four sides. Just by analysing the meaning of the terms, we see that the statement is true. We don’t need to do any evidence gathering to realise that 4 + 4 = 8. Analytic statements are true by definition.

Be wary of people presenting arguments or claims and giving them a bit of extra rhetorical “ompf” by throwing in the phrase “by definition.” For example over at Scott Klarr’s blog you’ll read: “If a god is not composed of matter or energy, then that god, by definition, does not exist.” This is not true at all. Sure, someone might wish to argue that in fact nothing but physical matter and energy exists, and because of this fact, a God who is not physical does not exist. But none of this is a question of definition, it’s a question of fact – facts that people clearly do not agree on.

As a second example, take the comments of an anonymous author here: “If, in order for a belief to be rational, I must have reasons for the belief, then faith is, by definition, not rational.” Again, this just misuses the phrase “by definition.” The author misleadingly suggests that s/he is talking about an analytic truth. The author might think that things held as articles of religious faith are in fact not supported by reasons, but this is a matter of contestable opinion, and certainly not merely a matter of definition. Even if it’s true, it would only be true because we checked the reasons that all religious people held their beliefs, and we discovered that they have no reasons for their beliefs.

So there you go: Analytic vs Synthetic truth.

Glenn Peoples