Warranted Christian Belief

Extended A/C Model

"The Extended A/C Model: Revealed to Our Minds," sets out the cognitive side of this process. The process involves the affections as well as reason, however (i.e., it involves will as well as intellect), and chapter 9, "The Testimonial Model: Sealed upon Our Hearts," explains some of the connections between reason and the affections.

Verifiability Criterion of Meaning - Positivist

"Verifiability Criterion of Meaning," according to which a sentence makes sense, is literally significant, or is cognitively meaningful only if it is 'empirically verifiable' (or falsifiable)—only if, that is, its truth (or falsehood) can be established by something like the methods of natural and empirical science.

The Problem with Contemporary Theologians

Christian belief is belief, among other things, in the existence of God. And Christians believe that God is infinite: unlimited with respect to such important properties as knowledge, wisdom, goodness, and power. They also believe that God is transcendent: distinct from the created universe, in no way dependent on it, and such that it is dependent on him. Finally, they assume that it is possible to refer to God, talk and think about him, address him in prayer, and worship him. Many contemporary theologians, however, apparently believe that these ideas are excessively naive: they hold that there are profound problems in the very idea that we can refer to and think about a being characterized in the way Christians characterize God.

Locke's Four Categories: Paradigm of Knowledge

First, there is what he regards as the paradigm of knowledge: perceiving the "agreement or disagreement of our ideas."...such propositions as 2 + 1 = 3.12 A properly functioning human being can simply see that these propositions are true (and further, that they couldn't possibly be false). Second,

God's Unlimited Power

God is unlimited with respect to power, then he has power, which is certainly a positive property. If he is unlimited with respect to being able to accomplish his will, then he has the positive property of being able to accomplish his will. And if nothing can prevent him from doing what he wills, then he has the positive property of being able to do what he wills. God has every great-making property to the maximal degree.

Christian Mystical Practice

My main thesis in this chapter, and indeed in the whole book, is that CMP is rationally engaged in since it is a socially established doxastic practice that is not demonstrably unreliable or otherwise disqualified for rational acceptance.

Is Christianity Self-Evident

No; the central truths of Christianity are certainly not self-evident, nor, so far as anyone can see, are they such that they can be deduced from what is self-evident. Of course, that is nothing whatever against Christian belief; the same holds for, for example, what we are taught by historians, physicists, and evolutionary biologists. So the de jure question can't be the question whether Christian belief is rational in this sense. That is because a negative answer to the question is supposed to be a serious criticism of Christian belief; but it is no criticism of Christian belief (or the theory of evolution, or the belief that you live in Cleveland) that it is not a deliverance of reason in this sense.

Properties and Concepts Unknown

Of course there are properties of which I have no concept. Small children often lack the concept of being a philosopher; that is to say, they have no grasp of the property being a philosopher. Large philosophers often lack the concept of being a quark; that is to say, they have no grasp of the property being a quark. No doubt there are properties none of us human beings grasps.

Predicating God

Of course, such a description succeeds in actually naming something only if there really is a being who is all-powerful and all-knowing and created the universe.

A Being Such That Our Concepts Don't Apply to It

One who makes the claim seems to set up a certain subject for predication—God—and then declare that our concepts do not apply to this being. But if this is so, then, presumably, at least one of our concepts—being such that our concepts don't apply to it—does apply to this being.

Self-Evident

If a proposition is so utterly obvious that we can't even understand it without seeing that it is true.

Properties and Concepts Known

A concept applies to something (a thing falls under that concept) only if that thing is wise, only if, that is, it has the property of being wise. Properties and concepts are thus correlative. I have the concept being wise only if I grasp, apprehend, understand the property being wise. I have the concept being a prime number if and only if I grasp or apprehend the property being a prime number. For each property or attribute of which I have a grasp, I have a concept.

Available referent

A particular imaginative construct that bears significantly on human life and thought. It is the "available God" whom we have in mind when we worship or pray ... it is the available God in terms of which we speak and think whenever we use the word "God." In this sense "God" denotes for all practical purposes what is essentially a mental or imaginative construct. - Kaufman

Kaufman's Argument

Absolutely nothing within our experience can be directly identified as that to which the term 'God' properly refers; he adds that if this is so, then there is a real problem for the reference of our term 'God': if nothing within our experience can be directly identified as that to which the term 'God' properly refers, then what meaning does or can the word have?...The idea must be, then, that if God is not a finite reality, then we cannot experience him; we cannot perceive him (we cannot see, hear, or touch him) or in any other way experience him. An infinite being—one that is omnipotent and omniscient, for example—cannot be perceived or experienced in any way whatever.

Proper Noetic Structure

According to the classical foundationalists (and everyone else), you can't properly believe just any proposition on the basis of just any other. I can't properly believe, for example, the proposition that Abraham lived around 1800 B.C. on the basis of the proposition that Brutus stabbed Julius Caesar; the latter has nothing to do, evidentially speaking, with the former. Rather, I properly believe A on the basis of B only if B supports A, is in fact evidence for A. Again, this notion of evidential support is difficult and controversial..

Deontological Justificxation

But if it is justification in the deontological sense, the sense involving responsibility, being within one's intellectual rights, she is surely justified.

Literal vs. Mythological Truth

By 'literal' truth, he just means truth, ordinary truth: "The literal truth or falsity of a factual assertion ... consists in its conformity or lack of conformity to fact: 'it is raining here now' is literally true if and only if it is raining here now." The mythological truth of a statement is a horse of quite another color: "A statement or set of statements about X is mythologically true if it is not literally true but nevertheless tends to evoke an appropriate dispositional attitude to X"

De Facto Objections

De facto objections: objections to the truth of Christian belief. Perhaps the most important de facto objection would be the argument from suffering and evil. It has often been stated philosophically, but has also received powerful literary expression (for example, in Dostoevski's The Brothers Karamazov). The objection goes as follows: according to Christian belief, we human beings have been created by an all-powerful, all-knowing God who loves us enough to send his son, the second person of the divine Trinity, to suffer and die on our account; but given the devastating amount and variety of human suffering and evil in our sad world, this simply can't be true.

De Jure Objections Conclusions

De jure objections, by contrast, while perhaps more widely urged than their de facto counterparts, are also much less straightforward. The conclusion of such an objection will be that there is something wrong with Christian belief—something other than falsehood—or else something wrong with the Christian believer: it or she is unjustified, or irrational, or rationally unacceptable, in some way wanting.

Locke's Four Categories: Demonstrative Knowledge

I can come to know a proposition by deducing it from or seeing that it is entailed by propositions of the above three sorts (where a proposition p entails a proposition q just if it is not possible, in the broadly logical sense, that p be true and q false. Accordingly, some propositions that you can deduce from propositions that are self-evident, incorrigible, or evident to the senses are also certain for you; among these propositions, Locke thinks, is the existence of God (IV, x, 1-6, pp. 306-10). Indeed, he adds, "From what has been said, it is plain to me we have a more certain knowledge of the existence of a God, than of anything our senses have not immediately discovered to us."

De Jure Question

Is it rational, reasonable, justifiable, warranted to accept Christian belief—Christian belief as outlined in the preface?

Duty to the Truth

It may be hard to state this duty exactly; perhaps it is in the neighborhood of a requirement to do your best to believe as many important truths as possible and avoid as many important falsehoods as possible.

Warranted Belief

More fully, a belief has warrant just if it is produced by cognitive processes or faculties that are functioning properly, in a cognitive environment that is propitious for that exercise of cognitive powers, according to a design plan that is successfully aimed at the production of true belief.

Fideism

Reliance on faith rather than reason in pursuit of religious truth. Many oppose faith to reason, declaring both that faith prescribes what reason proscribes (condemns), and that it is faith that is to be accepted and followed:

Calvin on Knowledge of God

Second, it also sounds as if Calvin thinks knowledge of God is innate, such that one has it from birth, "from his mother's womb." Still, perhaps Calvin doesn't really mean to endorse either of these suggestions. The capacity for such knowledge is indeed innate, like the capacity for arithmetical knowledge. Still, it doesn't follow that we know elementary arithmetic from our mother's womb; it takes a little maturity. My guess is Calvin thinks the same with respect to this knowledge of God; what one has from one's mother's womb is not this knowledge of God, but a capacity for it. Whatever Calvin thinks, however, it's our model; and according to the model the development of the sensus divinitatis requires a certain maturity (although it is often manifested by very young children).

Locke's Four Categories: Propositional Knowledge

Second, there is knowledge of propositions about the contents of your own mind, that is, propositions about the ideas of which you are the subject. An example would be your knowledge that you have a mild pain in your left elbow, or that you seem to see something white (i.e., things look to you the way they look when you are in fact seeing something white). This knowledge, says Locke, is infallible (IV, i, 4, p. 169, and elsewhere). This means at least that you cannot mistakenly believe such a proposition; if you believe that you seem to see something white, it follows that you do seem to see something white (though, of course, you may be mistaken in thinking there really is something white there).

Problem with Antinomies

Suppose a man had the benefit of immortality and had a bottle of wine that would improve every day, no matter how long he waits to drink it. Would he be rationally obliged never to drink it, on the grounds that for any time he might be tempted to, it would be better yet the next day? Suppose a donkey were stranded exactly midway between two bales of hay: would it be rationally obliged to stay there and starve to death because there is no more reason to move to the one bale than to the other?

Mark on Religion

The basis of irreligious criticism is man makes religion, religion does not make man. In other words, religion is the self-consciousness and the self-feeling of the man who has either not yet found himself, or else (having found himself) has lost himself once more. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, a perverted world consciousness, because they are a perverted world....

Freud's View of the Origin of Religion

The father of the primal horde, since he was an unlimited despot, had seized all the women for himself; his sons, being dangerous to him as rivals, had been killed or driven away. One day, however, the sons came together and united to overwhelm, kill, and devour their father, who had been their enemy but also their ideal. After the deed they were unable to take over their heritage since they stood in one another's way. Under the influence of failure and remorse they learned to come to an agreement among themselves; they banded themselves into a clan of brothers by the help of the ordinances of totemism, which aimed at preventing a repetition of such a deed, and they jointly undertook to forgo the possession of the women on whose account they had killed their father. They were then driven to finding strange women, and this was the origin of the exogamy which is so closely bound up with totemism. The Totem meal was the festival commemorating the fearful deed from which sprang man's sense of guilt (or 'original sin')....

Aristotelian Rationality

The idea is that human beings, unlike at least some other animals, have concepts and can hold beliefs; they can reason, reflect, and think about things, even things far removed in space or time; human beings are (or, at any rate, can be) knowers.

transcendental idealism

The philosophy of Immanuel Kant and later Kantian and German Idealist philosophers; a view according to which our experience is not about the things as they are in themselves, but about the things as they appear to us. It differs from standard (empirical) idealism in that it does not claim that the objects of our experiences would be in any sense within our mind. The idea is that whenever we experience something, we experience it as it is for ourselves: the object is real as well as mind-independent, but is in a sense corrupted by our cognition (by the categories and the forms of sensibility, space and time). Transcendental idealism denies that we could have knowledge of the thing in itself. A view that holds the opposite is called transcendental realism.

Noetic Structure

The set of propositions a person believes together with certain epistemic relations that hold among him and these propositions. Beliefs you accept on the basis of other beliefs. (Part of foundationalism)

Freud's Psychological Origin of Religion

These [religious beliefs], which are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes. As we already know, the terrifying impressions of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection—for protection through love—which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one. Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfillment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilization; and the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfillments shall take place.

De Jure Objections

These are arguments or claims to the effect that Christian belief, whether or not true, is at any rate unjustifiable, or rationally unjustified, or irrational, or not intellectually respectable, or contrary to sound morality, or without sufficient evidence, or in some other way rationally unacceptable, not up to snuff from an intellectual point of view. There is, for example, the Freudian claim that belief in God is really a result of wish fulfillment; there is the evidentialist claim that there isn't sufficient evidence for Christian belief; and there is the pluralist claim that there is something arbitrary and even arrogant in holding that Christian belief is true and anything incompatible with it false.

Locke's Four Categories: Knowledge of Other Things

Third, there is also a kind of knowledge of "other things," of external objects around you.

Warrant

Warrant as a name for that property—or better, quantity—enough of which is what makes the difference between knowledge and mere true belief.

Locke's Revelation Proved by Reason

Whatever God hath revealed is certainly true: no doubt can be made of it. This is the proper object of faith: but whether it be a divine revelation or no, reason must judge.

Antinomies

antinomies: allegedly powerful arguments on both sides of a given question. A Paradox.

Foundationalism

epistemological view that all knowledge ultimately rests upon a firm base of self evident truth/truths

Deontologism

morality is a matter of following absolute rules, which are binding on all moral agents regardless of time and circumstance

Tautology

needless repetition which adds no meaning or understanding ("widow woman," "free gift")

Social Doxastic Practices

socially established ways of forming belief.

Evidentialism

the view that religious beliefs can be rationally accepted only if they are supported by one's "total evidence" understood to mean all the propositions that one knows or justifiably believes to be true