Some Positions I Hold on Issues

The following is a list, in no particular order, of various positions I hold within philosophy and theology. I don’t really explain these positions as follows. I also hold these positions to varying degrees ranging from “fairly certain” all the way down to “leaning this way,” and I don’t provide any way to distinguish these degrees in this list. I encourage you to comment on some of my positions, whether you want clarifying questions (I’m happy to explain both the question and the answer) or want to know the degree to which I hold these things. I am also willing to answer questions about positions I forgot to include!

Theism: Theistic personalism

Worldview: Christianity

Human constitution: Cartesian dualism, dichotomy

Modal actualism/modal realism: Modal actualism

Omniscience: Yes, full omniscience

Providence: Molinism (middle knowledge)

Soteriology: Corporate election and individual election

Eschatology: Premillennial, pre-tribulational

Dispensational/Covenant: Progressive dispensationalism

Sign gifts: Moderate cessationalist

Science, realism/anti-realism: Realism

A priori knowledge: Yes, intuitionism

Justification: Basic foundationalism

Epistemology: Reformed epistemology, proper functionalism

Perception: Direct realism (adverbial theory)

Abstract objects: Nominalism-Divine conceptualism (tie)

Internalism/Externalism: Externalism

Natural Theology: Yes

Ontological argument: Yes, including original and modal formulations

Apologetic method: Cumulative case

Free will: Soft libertarianism

Ethics: Objective morality, deontological, divine command theory

Coherence of moral law: non-conflicting absolutism

Truth: Correspondence theory

Knowledge: warranted true belief

Time: A-theory

Bible: Inspired, inerrant

Trinity: Trinity Monotheism model of Social Trinitarianism

Impeccability/Peccability of Christ: Impeccability

Original sin/Original guilt: Original sin

Atonement: Kaleidoscope theory

Eternal security: Yes

Creation/Evolution: Creation

Genesis 6, fallen angels or godly/ungodly lines: Lines

Rahab: sin/innocence: Innocence

Logical Problem of Evil: Free will defense

Probabilistic Problem of Evil: Skeptical theism

Theodicy: Kaleidoscope theodicy approach

Certainty and Confidence in Christianity

Last Saturday I was having a conversation with some friends in a small philosophy group that regularly meets. I mentioned to them that I am less certain now of my faith than I have ever been. This was met with appropriately raised and concerned eyebrows. But allow me to explain to you, as I did to them, precisely what I mean.

When I say I am less certain now, I mean something that I call “Cartesianly certain.” Cartesian certainty is that certain knowledge you have that the contrary is logically impossible. I may be overstating a bit and lacking nuance here, but this is generally how I take it. This is to be distinguished from colloquial certainty, or the certainty of the everyday life. Thus, while I am colloquially certain I am typing this blog post right now, I am not Cartesianly certain. Why not? Because I could, for all I know, be a brain in a vat or have been kidnapped by the government and this (right now) is all a vivid dream that I will promptly forget when I wake up in Guantanamo. So know that when I say “certain” from here on out in this post, I mean this kind of Cartesian certainty.

When I was younger, I was quite brash. I would proclaim strongly and loudly that Christianity was the only way (a truth to which I hold strongly even today!). Yet I can distinctly remember the first time I really encountered a presentation of a version of the problem of evil. I thought it ridiculous, dismissed it out of hand, and moved on as though I had heard nothing. For while I was quite certain that Christianity was true, I lacked dispositional certainty that Christianity was true. This sounds contradictory; allow me to explain.

Dispositional certainty is the term I am using to explain the conditions under which one remains certain of his beliefs. That is, if I were to be challenged with the problem of evil, seriously consider its challenge to Christian theism, and remain just as firm as I was prior to the challenge, then I am to be considered not only certain, but dispositionally certain. This would hold for any such challenge to Christianity. Thus, on the contrary, if I were to face such a challenge and wither, then while I am certain, I am not dispositionally certain. My faith was on thin ice and I didn’t even know it. I lacked dispositional certainty in favor of the cool comforts of going with the flow.

While I have come to realize that I cannot be Cartesianly certain in my faith (after all, faith, while rational, and buffered with evidence, is not the answering of every possible question that could ever arise), I have dispositional certainty in abundance. I do not fear an argument against Christianity, even if I have never heard it before (at my worst, I may fear public humiliation if I cannot answer right away; but that’s an ego problem, not a faith problem). This dispositional certainty we might call confidence.

Thus, paradoxically, while I am less certain of my faith now than ever before, I am more confident in it now than ever before. And this confidence, I suspect, is part of what is called “growing up.” How can you grow up? Is it by sheer power of will? That seems unlikely.

What’s more likely is, at least in part, trying to live out Matthew 22:37, and bear the fruit of the Spirit of Galatians 5. Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and let your life bear the marks of one who has had God work within his very soul.

Can I Trust my Beliefs on Determinism?

I’m considering the implications of causal determinism on our cognitive faculties. I’m trying out an argument here that probably looks familiar, being more or less a hodgepodge of some other arguments.

1.     The probability of your reasoning processes being correct on any given belief, given determinism, is inscrutable.

2.     Either your beliefs can be regarded to come from a reliable source or they cannot.

3.     If they can, then any non-circular form of reasoning to support this can be used for libertarian free will (LFW) as well.

4.     If that form of reasoning can be used for LFW, then LFW has the explanatory advantage as an account of the will.

5.     If your beliefs cannot be regarded to come from a reliable source, then no one belief has any reason to be held as true over any others.

6.     If no one belief has any reason to be held as true over any others, then the belief that you are causally determined has no reason to be held as true.

7.     Therefore, either LFW has the explanatory advantage as an account of the will, or the belief that you are causally determined has no reason to be held as true.

1               is just saying that, given causal determinism about your cognitive faculties, we can ask ourselves the question: What is the probability that my reasoning processes that are supposed to confer justification on my beliefs are correct? The answer seems to be that such a probability is inscrutable. Why? Because for any way you would go about assessing that probability, you would be appealing to your cognitive faculties and reasoning processes. But how do you know that these reasoning processes are correct, given causal determinism about them? Suppose that an evil demon is just pulling levers to give you occurrent beliefs and reasoning processes. Of course it would seem to you to be correct; it’s not as though the demon was causing only some beliefs, leaving your reasoning process and general cognitive faculties untouched. No, all of your noetic structure is determined, on this supposition.

Now notice what I’m not doing here. I’m not saying something like “your cognitive faculties are unreliable” or “you cannot know if any of your beliefs are correct.” I am saying “your cognitive faculties are unreliable, given determinism,” and you cannot know if any of your beliefs are correct, given determinism.” These are epistemological concerns. Now whether (1) can be ultimately rejected by the determinist will pop up in a later premise. For now, let’s move to (2). That premise is a disjunction that exhausts all of the logical possibilities. It occurs to me that most determinists will likely want to affirm the first disjunct of (2). That leads us to (3). Whatever non-circular rescue that can be used can also be used to support LFW. Where do I get that? Well, think of the type of things a determinist might want to use: the idea of logical laws. Though attempting to fully justify logical laws is circular on LFW also (since one must presuppose logic in order to use it), it’s just as bad or worse on determinism[1], since the determinist must hold that even considering the laws contains a causally determining influence, one not present were LFW to be true. What about God’s ensuring it to be the case that one’s reasoning process is reliable. Well, that contains two major issues. First, if God is causally determining everything, it at least appears as though God does not uniformly make it the case that everyone’s reasoning process is reliable; how do you know yours is not similarly affected? That leads to the second major issue: appealing to what God would do (or even has done) assumes a kind of reliability to belief. That’s fine and good, since (3) entails a rejection of (1), but let’s see if this option is available to the libertarian: yes it is!

(4) is just the claim that since all of the same solutions are available to those of us who believe in LFW, then LFW has the explanatory advantage. Why? Simply because it seems to us that we have LFW. All things being equal, simplicity is a preferable criterion in adjudicating between different explanations.[2] And the simplest explanation of our seeming to have LFW is, on this discussion, actually having LFW.

So what happens if you bite the bullet, and accept that your beliefs cannot be regarded to come from a reliable source with respect to your cognitive faculties? Well then it follows that none of your beliefs can be espoused with any degree of confidence, and if that happens, then the belief that your cognitive processes are causally determined cannot be espoused with any degree of confidence.

Thus, no matter which way you go, either LFW has the explanatory advantage as an account of the will, or the belief that you are causally determined has no reason to be held as true. If the former, then you should give up causal determinism and embrace LFW. If the latter then at the weakest you should be agnostic about the will. But it’s even worse than this for the causal determinist: for surely you now believe something about the preceding argument and any of the premises. So you must affirm that there is a belief such that it can be held with confidence. But then, by modus tollens, you ultimately commit yourself to leaning LFW. I’m sure there are both worries about the argument’s premises and responses to things I have claimed. I’d like to hear them!

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[1] Note well, on this argument, it only needs to be just as bad, not worse (though obviously that would be an added bonus).

[2] Simplicity also seems to be a properly basic belief.

What Do We Know, and How Do We Know It? Part 3

In this third installment of our epistemology series, I want to discuss something that’s somewhat controversial. In observing several debates between Christians and skeptics (or adherents of other religious traditions), I have noticed something like the following exchange take place.

Skeptic: “Faith means belief without evidence! You have to have evidence for your beliefs. Therefore, your faith is irrational.”

Christian: “I agree that you have to have evidence for all of your beliefs, but my faith is not irrational because I have evidence!”

Without getting too technical, I think it’s a mistake to claim that in order to believe something, you must have evidence for your belief. Now before I even get started, let me make sure it is clear what I am not saying. I am not saying that your beliefs don’t have to be rational, or that literally any old belief is rational. Instead, I am making the claim that there are some beliefs that you have, right now (if you were to reflect on them) that you do not believe in virtue of any evidence whatsoever. And you are fully justified in taking those beliefs to be correct.

“Give me some examples!” you might demand, and I will oblige. Consider your name. If I were to ask you what your name was, while you could say, “Hold on a minute! I’m going to find the birth certificate, and cross-reference it with county records, and then I’ll have some solid evidence on which to base my conclusion, and we’ll know my name on the basis of the evidence!,” you’re more than likely just going to respond with your name. You aren’t thinking about it, you probably don’t even remember acquiring the belief of what your name is. You just find yourself believing that your name is such-and-such. But suppose you do remember it?

Well that leads to another interesting example. Memory beliefs can be boosted in credibility by evidence. Everyone knows that. But, interestingly, memory beliefs cannot be non-circularly relied upon by themselves. What? Let’s say you watched a video, and it lasted a few minutes (say ten, just for fun). As soon as it finishes, someone asks you, “What was that video about?” Literally everything you say will be from memory, and those constitute your memory beliefs. However, no one will then say “you believe that without any evidence!” Your memory beliefs, without evidence, are normally taken to be justified. But perhaps you will say that your memory beliefs just are the evidences for the claim of what happened during the film. That is all well and good, but what evidence do you have for your memory beliefs themselves? It can’t be that your memory has served you well in the past, for that is a memory belief. It can’t be anything you’ve read or reasoned about in the past, for those are delivered to you via memory beliefs as well.

What about perception? Things that you see in front of you, like trees, people, buildings, and so on, are all perceived by our physical senses. We have no way of determining that these senses are correct, for any tests we may run will rely on these senses being accurate. So what is our conclusion, then? Is it the case that memory beliefs, perceptual beliefs, beliefs about our name and our parents, and all, are all unjustified as they stand (would we really want to say, for example, that no one really knows their own name unless she examines the birth certificate?)? Surely not!

Instead, we have to look at the options. If we agree that these beliefs are or can be justified, then we really have only a couple of options. First, we can say that beliefs are justified circularly, where belief A justifies B, B justifies C, and C justifies A. I don’t particularly like that idea, and I won’t dedicate space to it here (I’ve written elsewhere on it). The other option is to say that these “epistemic chains” end in some belief that is not justified by any further belief, but is nonetheless rational to be held. This is the view I hold.

There are some beliefs out there that, if we found ourselves in the appropriate design environment, we would be warranted in believing. If God exists, it stands to reason that he would create us with a sense of his presence, or his existence. If the Christian God exists, he would want us to know him. He wouldn’t want it to be up to the accidents and contingencies of where we lived, or who we encountered, or the strength or weakness of our intellects. Instead, he would make his presence known to humanity through a sense of the divine. If that happened, then we have warrant to think God exists, independently of any evidence we might encounter.

What does this mean for apologetics conversations? That we merely presuppose God exists? What it means is that the question of whether someone is justified in taking it to be the case that God exists without evidence can only be answered in the negative if it were to be demonstrated that God does not, in fact, exist. There’s nothing irrational about belief in God independent of evidence if God exists. If he does not, then there may be. But either way, one cannot demand that I have evidence for this belief. This view is often called “reformed epistemology,” and was largely developed by Alvin Plantinga (though I don’t see too much Reformed about it!).