Hi Randy,
Just wanted to get your take on the issue
of hard-agnosticism (I think that's the right term here) with regard to
the existence of God & the afterlife. Reason I ask is because I was
watching a TV show here in the UK last Sunday where Murray Walker, a famous
British F1 motor-racing commentator, was asked in a an interview whether he was
fatalistic about life after recently beating cancer, and he answered:
"Where we came from & where
we're going to, I don't know, & nobody knows. I don't know
anybody who's been there & come back & can tell us what it was
like."
In response to the interviewer noting to
him that maybe people of faith might have more certainty about the answer
to that question, he said, "People who have faith have more certainty
about where they think they might be going but they don't know.... they dont
know, any more than I do."
Just wondered how you'd respond to that
sort of argument? There'd seem to be a couple of ways to rebutt him but one
mistake he seems to make - & I'm not sure if you'd agree or not - is that
he seems to assume there's only one way of getting knowledge of the afterlife;
that is, he thinks knowledge can only come by going to heaven &
coming back. But maybe there are other ways of proving (maybe not 100% proof)
man has a soul that lives on after death & that would be using
philosophical arguments. Maybe it'd be similar to answering people who say
stuff like, "Nobody knows whether God exists or not since nobody has seen
Him." The argument would seme to overlook that maybe God's
existence can be proved in other ways; namely, one might use classical theistic
arguments like the Kalam, Teleological or Moral Arguments to get to a creator
God. Your thoughts?
God Bless
James, London, England
James,
I find your
question very interesting because it touches on the cultural and “man on the
street” type of attitude that many in the UK (and continental Europe, and even
in North America) have toward religious belief. Hard agnosticism is the term
for the view that not only does someone not know whether there is a God, but
that it is not possible to be known. I think your assessment of his comments
might be correct: it definitely is plausible that we can construct
philosophical arguments. But not just for an immaterial soul, but also for the
merits of what C.S. Lewis called “mere Christianity.” In that case, what we
have here may not be certainty, but it would qualify as a justified, true
belief that Christianity is true. If we have that belief, and if Christianity
teaches some kind of eternal state afterlife for the soul (which orthodox
Christianity does teach), then, by extension, one has justification for her
belief that she will spend eternity with God, or, if by some strange reason she
accepts Christianity as true but refuses to side with God, eternity without God
in punishment.
However, perhaps
his real issue is contained in the
interviewer’s question and his answer. The interviewer asked if those who had
faith had “more certainty” about religious belief in the afterlife. Walker
responded, according to your question, with the comment about people having
certainty about what they think, but that they do not actually know. Now I think it would be naïve of
us to assume he had the idea of a justified, true belief in the use of the word
“know.” Instead, context invites us to believe that he conceives of knowledge
in terms of certainty. Now there are several ways of cashing out the term “certainty”
(e.g., Cartesian certainty, where the fact in question cannot logically be
doubted; rational certainty, where the fact in question cannot rationally be
doubted; legal certainty, where the fact in question lies beyond a reasonable
doubt; colloquial certainty, where one relies on a strong sense of belief, such
as memory beliefs, perceptual beliefs, etc.), but regardless of which he means,
none of these succeeds as an account of knowledge. Perhaps the problem of hard
agnosticism would collapse into a soft agnosticism if only people had a better
grasp of what constitutes knowledge!
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