Philosophy 1600 - Honors Seminar

 

Topic 3: Are Proofs of the Existence
of God Religiously Relevant?

Michael Scriven's "The Presumption of Atheism"

1. Scriven's Theses Concerning Faith and Reason

 

Scriven appears to advance three main theses here:

(1) It is always appropriate and important to ask whether one's faith in something is well-founded or not.

(2) Faith is well-founded only if there is evidence for what is believed, for what one has confidence in.

(3) Faith could be a way of knowing only if the conclusions arrived at by faith where such as could be arrived at by our normal ways of knowing - i.e., perceptual and scientific investigation and theorizing.

2. Scriven's Discussion of Faith and Reason

(1) The normal meaning of the term "faith": confidence in something.

(2) So understood, faith and reason are perfectly compatible, since we want to ask whether confidence is, in any given case, well-founded or ill-founded, and that will be a matter of the support that is available.

(3) Can faith be an alternative to reason? Can it be another way of knowing?

(4) What might be meant by saying that theism does not need justification by evidence?

(a) That it does not matter whether theism is true?

(b) That "there is some way of checking that it is correct without looking at the evidence for it"?

(5) Scriven argues that neither of these is true. As regards the former, people do care about whether theism is true.

(6) But what about the second alternative? Here Scriven advances the following claim:

"any method of showing that a belief is likely to be true is, by definition, a justification of that belief, that is, an appeal to reason." (403-4)

(7) But mightn't there be a way of showing that a belief was likely to be true that didn't involve connecting that belief up with anything like our ordinary perceptual beliefs, or our scientific beliefs?

(8) Scriven alludes to the case of telepathy, and his argument is that one would be justified in viewing telepathy as a way of knowing about the thoughts, feelings, and other mental states of other people only if one had checked out telepathic claims, and found that they were true. So to be justified in holding that telepathy is a way of knowing one has to appeal to checks involving our ordinary ways of knowing.

(9) Is Scriven right about this? What if we couldn't check, but found that there was intersubjective agreement? Could we appeal to an inference to the best explanation to support the view that telepathy was a way of knowing?

(10) Further, contrast the case of telepathy, or the case of precognition, with the idea of another sense. Mightn't it seem to one that one was aware of new properties, and if there was a group of people whose independent descriptions of the states of affairs apparently involving the new properties mapped into one's own descriptions, wouldn't one be justified in holding that the experiences in question really gave one access to something objectively real?

3. Criticism of Scriven's Discussion of Faith and Reason

(1) Scriven seems to fail to distinguish between the following two theses:

(a) If faith, or religious experience, is to be a way of knowing, then it must be possible to establish the conclusions of faith by appealing to our ordinary perceptual knowledge and scientific knowledge.

(b) If faith, or religious experience, is to be a way of knowing, then it must be possible to show that it is so by appeal to general theory of knowledge, including such things as (i) principles concerning non-inferential knowledge, and (ii) principles concerning inductive reasoning.

(2) Scriven appears to be advancing the first of these theses, and that thesis does not seem justified.