Another set of propositions worth thinking about. However, the whole schmeer falls to the ground on its own premises. For all the talk of "evidence" the writer does not discuss any evidence at all except by way of abstraction, as if evidence was an "Idea" out there, as in Plato's cosmology. The evidence is historical and is found in the records of moral behavior expressed in ancient and other accounts of how people led their lives, the failures they were responsible for, how others saw them, and so forth. You can't have it both ways, either you value evidence or you don't. If you do, then that evidence should be discussed in detail and analyzed carefully. Hence these various points, while deserving serious thought eventually, are pointless prior to discussion of actual evidence. Billy ========================== The Prosblogion Is Religious Belief Reasonable? By Robert Gressis on October 19, 2013 11:52 PM | _25 Comments_ (http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/archives/2013/10/is-religious-be.html#comments) | _No TrackBacks_ (http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/archives/2013/10/is-religious-be.html#trackbacks)
Over at _Philosophy, et cetera_ (http://www.philosophyetc.net/2013/10/is-religious-belief-reasonable.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter) , Richard Yetter-Chappell claims that religious belief is not reasonable. Here is Yetter-Chappell's rationale behind his reasoning: 1. At most, the cosmological and fine-tuning arguments support minimal deism. (I'm not sure what minimal deism is; is it simply the claim that something outside of the universe is causally responsible for either the universe's existence or for its order? Or is it the stronger claim that some kind of powerful, intelligent agent is causally responsible for either the universe's existence or its order?) 2. The ontological argument is sophistic, and the modal ontological argument is question-begging. 3. The fact that lots of philosophers of religion think that religious belief is reasonable provides no evidence for thinking that it's reasonable, because the best explanation for why they're philosophers of religion in the first place is that they're antecedently convinced of the claims of theism. Consequently, the best explanation of the fact that they find those arguments compelling is that they already believed them for non-evidential reasons. 4. There are very good reasons to disbelieve in theism, namely the arguments from evil and divine hiddenness. (I take it that Yetter-Chappell thinks that the responses to these arguments don't discredit these arguments.) 5. The additional claims of historical religions are either not "the kind of thing someone could end up believing as the result of a careful and unbiased assessment of the evidence" (presumably, things like the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Atonement, among others) or are "patently immoral" (like the doctrine of original sin, and the view that honest non-believers deserve eternal damnation). (Yetter-Chappell doesn't mention other arguments in the theistic arsenal, like Kant's moral argument or the argument from miracles. I'm guessing he either doesn't think they're worthy of discussion or thinks they convince too few people to mention, or both.) What is one to make of Yetter-Chappell's post? A few things, I think: First, I think that claims that philosophers of religion have made religious belief intellectually respectable are either overstated or false. Just based on anecdotal evidence, I get the impression that a lot of very intelligent philosophers, even ones who are personal acquaintances of Robert Adams, Marilyn Adams, Richard Swinburne, Eleonore Stump, Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, or Dean Zimmerman feel the same way as Yetter-Chappell. It would be good to get some empirical information on whether this is the case. Second, I must confess that his post unnerves me greatly. This is mainly because I get the impression that Yetter-Chappell is a very good philosopher who is intimately acquainted with much of contemporary philosophy of religion -- as well-acquainted with it as many of the people who post on this blog, I'm assuming (is that fair?) -- and I don't think he has the slightest doubt about his views. By contrast, I have nagging, deep doubts about my own religious beliefs. I think this is partly because you can publish lots of secular philosophy in generalist journals while explicitly assuming the truth of naturalism, whereas you can't publish philosophy that makes explicitly theistic assumptions in generalist journals (or can you? And if you can, under what circumstances can you do so? As a hypothetical? I don't count those). Perhaps I'm simply neuro-atypical, but I think that would consistently add to the confidence in my convictions. (And this says nothing of the naturalistic assumptions you can make in most conversations with most philosophers.) Third, I could be wrong, but I think you can run many of his arguments against moral realism. Let me go through them: 1*. What direct arguments are there in favor of moral realism? Michael Smith tries in The Moral Problem; how convincing is this? I gather that David Enoch, Russ Shafer-Landau, and Anita Superson try as well. How many are convinced? 2*. Kant's deduction of the categorical imperative/Mill's "proof" is sophistic. (There's a "gap" in Kant's deduction and Mill's proof trades on an equivocation within "x is desirable" between "x is something that one can desire" and "x is something that one ought to desire".) 3*. The fact that most normative ethicists and meta-ethicists (56.4%) are moral realists doesn't give any evidence in favor of moral realism, because those scholars became ethicists because they were antecedently convinced of the truth of moral realism. 4*. There are very good reasons to disbelieve moral realism, such as Mackie's argument from queerness and Harman's point that you don't need to invoke moral facts to explain anything about our behavior, attitudes, moral knowledge, etc. Indeed, this world is just the kind of world you would expect to see if our moral beliefs were the product of acculturation and evolutionary pressures. 5.* Most of the particular ethical beliefs that philosophers, and the public at large, have are not so much the result of careful study of evidence (few people look deeply into the evidence (sociological, psychological, economic, political scientific, etc.; nor are they the result of the application of a particular normative theory to cases), but rather because those beliefs are the ones their colleagues share, etc. Even if one accepts the above parallels, though, I'm not sure what they show. I'm guessing you can easily accept all of 1-5 while denying 1*-5*, but I find it difficult to do so, personally. If you agree with me that there are at least some parallels between moral realism and theism, why do you think moral realism is so much more respectable than theism? (Assuming it is.) -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
