Saturday, August 18, 2007

God and the Burden of Proof

This is Johnny-Dee's post on the burden of proof. I think I disagree with Johnny on this, but I will comment later.

6 comments:

Staircaseghost said...

I frankly have a low opinion of the utility of playing burden-of-proof tennis in (a)theistic debates. I've lost track of the number of formal exchanges where great stock is placed in the difference in wording of the debate resolution between "Is Christianity True?", "Is Christianity Reasonable?", "Is it 'Rational' to be an Atheist?" etc. and I have yet to see it make a substantive impact on the content of the exchange. The POE, the first cause argument, biblical errancy -- it's the same suite of arguments in any case.

The only thing I wish Christian apologists would do is accord the same burden of proof to their own parochial supernatural claims as they would to the millions of other supernatural claims. Are 1 billion Hindus all liars, lunatics, or (followers of) Lord Krsna? Do tarot cards work or don't they? Can the members of Joseph Kony's bible-based Lord's Resistance Army become immune to bullets through the use of holy water? Does John Edward talk to the dead?

Sturgeon's Lawyer said...

I'm inclined to agree with this fellow: agnosticism has no burden of proof; the only thing it asserts is its inability to make an assertion. Both theism and atheism make assertions, and so, in a world of "proof," require it.

I have long since decided that both are matters of faith, to which proof is irrelevant.

Anonymous said...

Christian supernatural claims are not parochial. They are intertwined with the philosophy, science and culture of the West, informing its deepest moral and intellectual foundations (cf. the works of Etienne Gilson, A.N. Whitehead, Pierre Duhem, etc.) I doubt Joseph Kony can say the same of his own.

Christian theism provides a broad, internally coherent, rigorous and expansive philosophical framework from which to make sense of the origin of the Universe, right and wrong, etc. Few other religions can say the same, except for the other 'world' religions like Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. If a religion making supernatural claims can present such intellectual pedigrees, I'll grant it a hearing. Otherwise it's not worth my time.

Please, skeptics, stop fooling yourselves. All supernatural/religious claims are NOT created equal. Each one must be judged according to its merits. The wide multiplicity of supernatural claims provides no warrant for making the absurd claim that "all are equally true" or conversely, "all are equally false".

Staircaseghost said...

Christian supernatural claims are not parochial. They are intertwined with the philosophy, science and culture of the West, informing its deepest moral and intellectual foundations

I love it. "We're not parochial, we're just historically limited and geographically confined." The point is mine.

Please, skeptics, stop fooling yourselves. All supernatural/religious claims are NOT created equal. Each one must be judged according to its merits. The wide multiplicity of supernatural claims provides no warrant for making the absurd claim that "all are equally true" or conversely, "all are equally false".

How fortunate, then, for me, that I said nothing of the kind. You do understand the difference between the burden of proof and truth, right?

stunney said...

hiero5ant wrote:

The only thing I wish Christian apologists would do is accord the same burden of proof to their own parochial supernatural claims as they would to the millions of other supernatural claims. Are 1 billion Hindus all liars, lunatics, or (followers of) Lord Krsna? Do tarot cards work or don't they? Can the members of Joseph Kony's bible-based Lord's Resistance Army become immune to bullets through the use of holy water? Does John Edward talk to the dead?

Let's suppose that all who come to the Father do so through Jesus Christ. Why is it necessary for them to get the name right, or have a true description inside their heads of Christ's salvific mediation role in the conceptual terms of Christian theology? Not even Christians have perfectly correct descriptions inside their heads of all the theological facts.

It's the Hesperus/Phosphorus thing again, I'm afraid. Frege's distinction between sense and reference. Semantic and epistemic externalism. Direct reference rather than the descriptive theory of reference. Kripke.

Jesus was an early opponent of the descriptive theory of reference. In Matthew 25, there is the parable of judgement. In that parable, the damned—-or to use the politically correct terminology, the 'eschatologically challenged' or the 'differently saved'—–protest their innocence, saying, "Lord, when did we see you hungry, etc, and not give you food, etc?" They're told that insofar as they neglected to care for the poor, they neglected to care for him, Jesus Christ.

In another saying, Jesus says that it's not those who say "Lord, Lord" who will inherit the kingdom, but those who actually do God's will. That could mean 23 million atheists will inherit the kingdom, and every TV evangelist will have to spend 14.5 trillion years in purgatory.

Two points to keep in mind. 1) Contradictory beliefs of any kind can't all be true; but some beliefs are true, and it's no argument against Christianity being true that some people hold beliefs that contradict it, just as it's no argument against evolutionary naturalism being true that some people hold beliefs that contradict it. 2) People do manage to refer all the time despite often doing so under false descriptions and inadequate conceptualizations. And this is as true of science as it is of theology.

A philosophical example: Let's suppose that substance dualism is true. It would not follow that all materialists had always failed to refer to anything when they used the word 'mind', and that all Berkeleyan idealists had always failed to refer to anything when they used the word 'body', even though the materialist theory of mind and the idealist theory of body are both erroneous, ex hypothesi.

A little lecture room trick is to point to an object while saying to the students, "D'you see that little metal chalk box over there attached to the wall?" They all nod and mumble affirmatively. Then you tell them that it's actually plastic and isn't a box at all, but a small shelf. Meanings are not objects inside human heads. Saying what they are is very tricky, but especially if you're a materialist.

There's evidence that Christianity is true. This is compatible with:

a) there also being some evidence for the truth of other religions

and with

b) bits of other religions also being true,

and with

c) adherents of other religions actually referring to many of the spiritual facts represented by Christian theology, but under strictly false or somewhat inadequate descriptions.

Some non-religious illustrations may help. In criminal law, there is often incriminating and exculpatory evidence. In the subject of history, there is often a range of evidence to support a number of conflicting theses, e.g, about Napoleon's generalship, or why Germany lost the First World War, or the social attitudes of ancient Greeks towards homosexuality, or why Britain was able to acquire such a large empire. Etc.

The Arabic word for 'God' is 'Allah'. Palestinian, Syrian, Egyptian, Iraqi and Lebanese Christians use that word exactly as Germans use 'Gott' and we use 'God' and Mexicans use 'Dios', etc. Now suppose the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is true. Would that mean that every time a Muslim said 'Allah', s/he was not referring to God? Or let's suppose a little old Catholic lady thinks each divine Person has a separate and distinct will, which is in fact not the case according to Catholic theology. Does this mean that when she recites the Creed at Mass each Sunday, she is not in fact referring to God, but is reciting her heretical belief in tritheism?

Dump the idea that reference can only be determined by true descriptions. Embrace Kripkeanism. If referring and meaning were all determined by or identical with the descriptions inside individual human heads, we could not refer or communicate or translate, because those descriptions—–the ideas we each have in our heads and which we associate with words in our various languages——-vary enormously, and are very often wholly or partially false, or inadequate, inaccurate, and misleading.

A scientific example: Hans Halvorson's demonstration that localized particles are not real, and hence that 'particle talk' has merely pragmatic utility, and is false if construed ontologically.

The issue of realism versus intrumentalism is pervasive, and is by no means peculiar to religion. But underlying that issue is the fundamental issue of whether, and how, human thought can refer to reality even though no human has anything like a complete set of true descriptions of the world inside their head, and even though we cannot stand outside ourselves and from a 'neutral', 'independent' vantage point compare reality 'as it really is' with our descriptions of reality. And an interesting question is to ask what justifies us in morally condemning the Falwells and Robertsons. Why is reality apparently such as to oblige us rationally and morally to prefer our conceptual schemes and theories over theirs? So you see, it's not just all religions failing to agree. It's human thoughts about lots of things failing to agree. If the fact of disagreement about religion disqualifies religion from the possibility of achieving referential and epistemic success, the same kind of disagreement disqualifies human thought generally.

But once one becomes a devotee of the gospel of Kripkeanism, you stop worrying about the possibility of one's descriptions of reality being false having the effect of preventing successful reference. So the physicists really are talking about a physical world, and the theologians really are talking about God, even if the descriptions are inadequate in both cases. The solution is modal logic. There is a possible world in which Berkeleyan idealism is false and in which matter exists independently of minds. There is a possible world in which theism is true. So we can refer to those possible worlds, and hence to mind-independent matter and to God, since reference does not reduce to description of naturalistic entities. Propositions and possible worlds are not physically detectable entities, and yet both are required by scientific reasoning itself, let alone theology.

Hence I can refer to the possible world in which Christianity is true and Hindus come to the Father through Jesus Christ without having subscribed to the relevant bits of Christian theology. And I believe that possible world coincides with, or is, the actual world.

Lah-dee-dah.

Staircaseghost said...

Whoa.