"Christians believe not by arguments, but by experience"

In this post (https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/01/gavin-ortlund-on-what-we-lose-when-we.html) I talk about Gavin Ortlund's interview. Ortlund remarks about how difficult it is to live as an atheist. But living as a Christian can be even harder (really, impossible) given the challenges to Christian belief. 

And while I agree that there are troubling existential worries for the atheist, such that virtue and despair may in some cases go together, I don't think this amounts to a problem for most non-religious folks most of the time. While broad factors of despair, which is what the existential worries are, can factor into someone's depression, I think it's really local factors of despair – the details of your life – that drives the live-ability of one's life.

In other words, even if an atheist has cause for despair from broad and regional considerations, as long as their life is going well, it's hard to fault them from happily pressing forward. It gets complicated though when the atheist is the contemplative type to the point where the broad factors affect them so much that they become local; or more precisely, the local factor that the atheist is this type of person, i.e. the contemplative type, becomes a factor of despair. Because being contemplative and facing the truth head-on, no matter how dark, is a virtue, virtue and despair may go together on atheism (especially when combined with pro-theism; that is, the person who loves God but cannot believe despairs). The question is whether the broad factors of despair really are factors of despair to begin with—whether the genuine truth-seeker ought to be affected by existential facts in such a personal and emotional way.

Anyway, Gavin says another interesting thing in that interview: that he doesn't believe on the basis of arguments, but on something else. He doesn't say experience exactly, but that is something I've heard Christians say. Plantinga's whole project is to show how Christians can have knowledge of Christianity without evidence. William Lane Craig has said that he believes by the inner witness of the Holy Spirit.

My issue with this is that arguments are experience – intellectual experience. If you experience the aha of understanding what an argument commits you to, then that's added to your life experience. So when Christians say they don't believe on the basis of arguments, they are saying their intellectual experiences aren't enough – some other kind of experience is needed. Christians often make the analogy of falling in love – intellectual experience only goes so far, and then some kind of intuitional, emotional, existential, or religious experience is needed to fall in love with God and make a commitment to God. A certain emotional and spiritual experience is required to be a Christian anyway.

But if religious actions are grounded in belief, and beliefs are propositional, and propositions bear truth values, and matters of truth are intellectual matters, then religious actions, like all belief-based actions, must have their ground in intellectual experience lest they be irrational. It is irrational to believe in something as though it were true while admitting you have no reason to think it's true. That would be to contradict yourself, to claim a connection between the belief and truth (as one always implicitly claims by believing instead of withholding belief) while admitting there is no such connection.

Here Christians could bring up William James or Pascal's Wager: Under special circumstances it's rational to believe without intellectual experience. Intellectualization is not always feasible, and so sometimes we depend on a leap of faith. We might apply this to foundational beliefs too: intellectualization is not possible anyway all the way down.

Or we might say the wager itself attempts to provide intellectual experience to ground a leap of faith in religious belief. Maybe we can say something similar about foundational beliefs. In any case, it's too bad the wager fails: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2024/03/why-pascals-wager-cannot-be-salvaged.html

Gavin Ortlund on what we lose when we lose God

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K-nHx7GBGA

3:20 - 4:00

"Let's suppose there is no God. It is hard to state how dark that is. What it means for our human nature, for love, for the way that I feel about my kids – so that's one of the most important things in my life, that feeling of love I have for them. If that's reductively explained by evolutionary psychology – basically I feel this way because it helped animals survive in my animal ancestry, and that's it, and there's nothing more – if I really try to live on that basis, I do find it dehumanizing. It tears away everything that I think gives life value and meaning, and hope."

It cannot possibly be dehumanizing to find out the true nature of humans. It would be the opposite; it would be a humanization of your views about yourself to find out what it really means to be human. Really, it's Christianity that dehumanizes us and makes us out to be these 'kingly creatures' or godly spiritual beings with immortal souls – made in the 'image of God' and loved by God to the point of incarnation, sacrifice, and salvation.

Clearly, Ortlund had in mind something other than the literal meaning of dehumanizing – something more along the lines of what he says next. If there is no God and we are mere flukes of nature – the result of particles smashing together in surprisingly productive ways – then there's no real reason for our existence. We are because we can be and that's simply how the dice came up; or, in the case of necessitarianism, we are because we must be as determined by the necessary laws of nature.

In one sense I'm in full agreement with Gavin Ortlund. I think we lose a lot when we lose God; in some sense losing God is an infinite loss, or at least an infinite disappointment. I think God entails that the universe is in the best possible state of affairs, or at least in one possible configuration of a best possible state of affairs. Hence, why I defend pro-theism. The world would be so much more meaningful and beautiful if death wasn't the end, but we went on to enjoy a world where nature and humanity are in perfect harmony, where we can explore galaxies and build worlds of our own. We can imagine a world infinitely better than ours, and it's pretty crushing to start with a worldview in which everything is enchanted by God's purpose and adoration only to come to believe that death is the end and we are just another bug crawling around on a speck of dust floating in a cosmic sea of indifference. We are not kingly creatures, but machines obeying complex lines of code that so happen to include the curse of subjective consciousness.

Reality is hellish compared to what we can imagine. Gavin is right – that's dark. But it's a darkness we must face. Hiding from it doesn't make it go away.

While the naturalistic worldview invites deep cynicism and pessimism, I don't think it entails the extreme version where humans are objectively worthless and all value is subjective. On that view, anthropocide isn't wrong in any real sense; destroying all of humanity wouldn't make any real difference. That's a degree of cynicism too extreme for me. I think that view fails to appreciate the reality of value.

In another post, I'll defend my view of mitigated cynicism. We should be cynical up to a point, but I argue that human value is immense, finite, and objective. Human value is not infinite like the idealists and Christians believe or want to believe. And human value is not nothing as the cynics think. And human value is not subjective like the anti-realists say. But that's for another time.