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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Alvin Plantinga

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 [55:27m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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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

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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

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In a recent discussion with one of the commenters over at M and M’s blog (see the interchange between myself and someone using the nickname “Heraclides”) it occurred to me yet again that there are people – especially on the internet – who frequently wander into arguments about what are essentially subjects in philosophy, who clearly don’t have a background in philosophy, who appear not to have done much (or any) reading in the area they are arguing about, who are at times not really familiar with some of the basic terminology involved (even though they are using it), and there’s nothing terrible about any of this so far – but then your realise that they are talking as though they are absolutely certain that they are experts in the field. You offer a little advice, but you are told by this obvious newcomer that you couldn’t possibly know what you’re talking about.

Take my recent encounter. I said that scientists treat theories as provisional, but they do not treat knowledge as provisional. Knowledge is, after all, warranted true belief, so a scientist only knows something if he has become convinced that it is true. The reply that I was promptly given was “Theories *are* knowledge This suggests to me that you don’t understand what a theory really is.” Oh, and as for the fact that knowledge is warranted true belief, this is what my zealous fellow blog visitor had to say:  “Only a religious person would write “knowledge is warranted true belief”. This both shows that you don’t understand science (and thereby aren’t in a position to criticise it) and that you don’t understand the failing of insisting something is “true belief” either (it’s blind to any revision or new information).”

Rather than simply get further frustrated at the bleak intellectual scene that one often finds in the comments section at blogs out there (as illustrated by the above encounter), I have decided to put a little more energy into becoming part of the solution. I’m adding a new category to my blog. The category is called “nuts and bolts.” In this new category, I’ll add posts that spell out basic terms and concepts used in the various subject areas in philosophy. You might think this is a bit redundant. After all, there are plenty of online dictionaries and encyclopedias out there. And you’re right, there are. But the way I see it, the more good basic information is out there, the more likely somebody will be to stumble upon it. So here it is, the very first post in the nuts and bolts category.

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As I’ve been saying a bit about Plantinga in the podcast recently, it’s fitting to comment on something that I recently found online. Evan Fales, back in 1994, wrote a book review critical of Alvin Plantinga’s Warrant and Proper Function. The review was originally published in the journal Mind, and you can read it here.

For those not already familiar with Plantinga’s epistemology, his idea of warrant (that is, the thing that makes a belief into knowledge, and not just a lucky true belief) involves the further idea of proper function. Fales, like me, takes Plantinga to hold to a variety of what’s known as reliabilism, but as not everyone shares that view (apparently), and since that doesn’t really matter for what I’m going to say about Fales’ attempt, let’s ignore that. For Plantinga, we have warrant for our beliefs if they are formed by a properly functioning set of belief forming faculties, functioning in a truth aimed way, in an enviromnment to which they are well suited, in accordance with a design plan. His argument is aimed at the conclusion that if atheism were true, knowledge would be impossible, since our belief forming faculties – indeed all of our faculties – simply don’t have a proper function, much less a design plan.

But Evan Fales thinks he has demonstrated a flaw in Plantinga’s view of knowledge. Here I will comment on only one such attempt on Fales’ part. He poses the following counter example:
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Here’s Episode 13, which is part 2 of my coverage of Plantinga and presuppositional apologetics.

In this episode I present Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. I then close by summing up the similarity between Plantinga and Van Til and co., and respond to one objection that is common to them both.

Also, for the first time ever – we have mail! I reply to it at the end of this episode.

Remember folks, if you’re regular listeners, I encourage you to subscribe via itunes (or download the file from this site, rather than listening to it at my site). That way, you download the whole episode just once even if you listen to it more than once, instead of effectively downloading it again every time you listen to it at this site, which really eats up the bandwidth. New listeners, feel free to listen to it at my site to get an idea of whether or not you want to subscribe.

 Episode 013: Plantinga and Presuppositional Apologetics, part 2 [48:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Here’s Episode 12 of the Berettacast: “Plantinga and Presuppositional Apologetics.” I’ve decided to give Plantinga two episodes, as it ended up filling up a big chunk of time. This is part 1, which looks at Plantinga’s argument for theism from Warrant.

 Episode 12: Plantinga and Presuppositional Apologetics [49:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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