"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

How should we talk about belief in God? Part 2

Do you believe in God? That's a difficult question. I want the question to specify:

Model of God

Model of doxastic attitude

Degree of doxastic attitude

Allow for a modified logic for doxastic purposes:

P = P is under consideration.

~P = P is not under consideration.

+P = P has been considered and affirmed. The weight of the reason(s) I have for affirming P outweighs the weight of the reason(s) I have for rejecting P (if I have any reason for rejecting P).

~+P = P has been considered but has not been affirmed because (1) I don't understand P well enough to affirm it, only enough to consider it (i.e., partial consideration) or (2) I worry about certain objections to P or (3) I have counterbalanced reasons for affirming and rejecting P.

-P = P has been considered and rejected. The weight of the reason(s) I have for rejecting P outweighs the weight of the reason(s) I have for affirming P if I have any reason at all for affirming P.

~-P = P has been considered and not rejected.

G = God exists.

Theism = +G

Atheism = -G

Agnosticism = ~+G ^ ~-G

Innocence = ~G

We can translate agnosticism as simply 'G' (considered but not accepted and not rejected). The idea is that if G is really under consideration, then it will be considered and affirmed, considered and rejected, or considered and neither confirmed nor rejected. So:

Agnosticism = ~+G ^ ~-G = G.

 

Rocks and trees are not atheists or agnostics but are innocents (after Graham Oppy's designations). Babies are innocents too.

There is a difference between affirming or believing P and P's being actually true or false. An agnostic neither affirms the existence nor non-existence of God, but the agnostic does affirm that God either exists or does not, keeping with classical logic. The agnostic simply does not want to make any claims of knowledge or confidence over what is actually the case.

What is the nature of this 'affirming' or 'believing'?

Liz Jackson discusses the nature of belief and credence here: https://philpapers.org/archive/JACTRB-5.pdf

See also: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/belief/

Beliefs are things we have. Beliefs, like sentences, express propositions and are not the propositions themselves. Propositions are claims about reality and can therefore be true (match with reality) or false (not match with reality). Beliefs can be true or false because they represent true or false propositions, just like sentences. It sounds weird though to say "I have a sentence" when it sounds fine to say "I have a belief." Beliefs are more like mental states (sometimes conscious, usually unconscious) or mental dispositions that can be translated in terms of a sentence. (We say thoughts are propositional. But are thoughts grammatical, like sentences are? Or should we say thoughts are propositional, and we happen to express propositions in that which is grammatical, namely sentences?)

Propositions are like maps. A map of America is about America and is attempting to represent America accurately. A proposition is about reality and can more or less accurately describe reality. (Though, the non-propositional mental states of animals also represent reality, such as the spatial layout of a territory.)

In addition to belief, you can suspect that God exists, be willing to bet on God's existence, be convinced that God exists, or have some pragmatic notion like William James' leap or Jordan Peterson's 'I live as if God exists,' which suggests some degree of suspicion that God exists. As Jackson points out, when the stakes are higher, some philosophers think that this context changes the nature of belief. Because of how high the stakes are with respect to God, belief in God could be contextually quite different from belief in more mundane things.

After we settle on a doxastic model, I want further context of what it means to believe something, namely, whether this person has tested their belief or not.  

Recall that theism = +G. That means this person has considered the proposition that God exists and they believe in it. But what is the degree of this person's consideration? What makes up the story behind that belief?

'Two argument' theism = +G(2)

This means, if we consider every good argument against God to be worth -1 and every good argument for God to be +1 (a good argument in this context meaning that the argument makes no clear mistake such that a reasonable person could be moved by the argument) then the two argument theist has, in the end, two good arguments above the arguments against God.

You could believe there are four good arguments for God and two good arguments against God. Or you could believe there are exactly two good arguments for God and exactly zero good arguments against God. Both result in the score of +G(2).

We might want to acknowledge the total number of arguments for God that you have considered, to add weight to what you consider to be good.

So let's say you have considered the following arguments for God:

1) WLC's Kalam

2) Josh Rasmussen's contingency argument

3) Josh Rasmussen's argument from consciousness

4) Argument from beauty

5) Argument from desire

6) Argument from history (evidence for Jesus' resurrection)

7) Argument from reason

8) Modal cosmological argument

9) Modal ontological argument

10) Argument from moral facts

11) Fine-tuning

12) The applicability of mathematics

13) Aquinas' Third Way

Etc

And arguments against God:

1) Argument from evil

2) Argument from ontological evil

3) Reverse ontological argument (which may or may not be independent from 2)

4) Divine hiddenness

It's complicated by the fact that it's not obvious which arguments are independent. A true analysis of the arguments for and against God would include an analysis of independence, combining dependent arguments into one for each group of dependent arguments.

You can either affirm, reject, or be agnostic to each of these arguments (assuming you have considered them all). Within your analysis of each argument that you accept or reject, you will have reasons to accept or reject the argument. In some cases, there will be conflicting reasons for accepting or rejecting an argument, such that you could be agnostic with respect to individual arguments.

For simplicity, let's say we have 17 independent arguments here, and you think 5 of the theist arguments are good while 1 of the atheist arguments are good. You believe in God. Then your score would be:

+G(5,1,17)

The 17 represents the total number of arguments for and against God you have considered. The first number is the number of those arguments that you think are favorable to God, and the second number is the number of those arguments that you think count against rational belief in God. So on this particular score, you have a mixed score with 5 good arguments for God and 1 good argument against God, and because your 'G' is a '+G' you must think the collective weight of those 5 is greater than the weight of the 1.

This is nice, because it gives far more context than the usual "Yes I believe in God" or "No I don't." We can see, along with the model of God and model of belief, far more specificity as to what it means for this person to believe, disbelieve, or withhold belief. Some scores are more 'impressive' or 'interesting' than others. Consider the hypothetical score:

G(0,0,100)

This person is agnostic, has investigated what they consider to be 100 independent arguments for and against God, and finds not a single argument to give any rational justification for belief in God or disbelief in God. Here's another interesting score:

-G(10,1,25)

This person is an atheist, has investigated 25 independent arguments for and against God, and thinks 10 arguments count in favor of God while only 1 argument counts against God. How could this be?

In this case, this atheist thinks there is only one good argument for atheism, say the problem of evil, but the problem of evil proves that God does not exist. The 10 arguments that count in favor of God help explain how it is that belief in God has been maintained by so many people across so many centuries, including many intellectuals. Those arguments give at least some rational justification for belief in God (or, as just articulated, they give some explanatory power as to how it is that past and current intellectuals could have been or could be convinced in God's existence).

Question: How can we represent the individual strength of arguments? It's misleading to count each argument as +1 or -1 as if each has the same strength. And yet, if you count one argument as +2, that will make it sound like you have two arguments when you have one strong argument.

I don't think this is a problem. You can easily infer whether someone thinks the arguments on one side or the other are strong by whether they have a +, a -, or neither by the 'G'. We shouldn't overcomplicate things, and this new system is already running the risk of overcomplicating things. In everyday life, I don't expect people to adopt a system like this anytime soon. It's much easier to just ask someone whether they believe in God and go from there. 

In fact, we may want to simplify to just one number, which is the number of good arguments that support your view (and for agnostics, the number of arguments they have seriously considered and remain unconvinced by).

But what do we mean by 'considered'? Do we mean that this person has some vague awareness of the argument? Or that they have written a Master's thesis on it? Or somewhere in between?

Something like this would be at least a good starting point: The argument is considered when you yourself feel confident enough to explain to someone why you think it succeeds, fails, or why you think it's unclear whether it succeeds or fails.

Next question: What counts as a good argument? This would be the next thing to model to give even more context as to what it means to believe in God.

How should we talk about belief in God? Part 1

Like I imagine how a lot of other people feel, I am not satisfied with typical designations like 'atheist', 'theist', and 'agnostic.' I feel like they leave too much out of the picture of a complicated issue.

In philosophy of religion, professional philosophers of religion usually define attitudes toward God's existence in the following way:

Atheist = Someone who believes there are no gods of any kind.

Theist = Someone who believes there is at least one god of some kind.

Agnostic = Someone who suspends judgment on whether there are any gods of any kind.

Paul Draper has some really good discussion over this topic: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/atheism-agnosticism/.

In popular circles, and online, usually you see self-described 'atheists' as describing themselves more like 'agnostic' above. Professional philosophers and lay folks use different definitions of 'atheism' in this way. (Ironically, I've seen many online atheists call it a mistake to define atheism in the way that professional philosophers define it.)

The problem with the above definitions is that someone could be agnostic with respect to one definition of 'God' while an atheist or theist with respect to another definition. So instead we might say:

Atheist = Someone who believes that God does not exist (with respect to some God G).

Theist = Someone who believes that God does exist (with respect to some God G).

Agnostic = Someone who suspends judgment on whether God exists (with respect to some God G).

So we have gone from a broad definition to a narrow one. Now it's a matter of defining G in terms of this or that model of God. Here are some models of God (not exhaustive):

1) The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and the Prophets (Judaism)

2) The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, the Prophets, Jesus, and Paul (Christianity)

3) The God of Muhammad (Islam)

4) Qualityless, non-dual Brahman (Advaita Vedanta Hinduism)

5) Qualified, dual Brahman (Dvaita Vedanta Hinduism)

6) That than which none greater can be conceived (Perfect being theology / the greatest conceivable being / the maximally great being / the greatest possible being / perfection instantiated)

7) Classical theism

8) Neo-Classical theism

9) Pantheism

10) Panentheism

11) Deism

12) Pagan gods (Odin, Zeus, etc.)

13) The Tao

14) Plotinus' The One

15) Plato's The Good

16) John Hick's The Real

17) Apophatic theology

18) Process theism

Anyone can be an atheist, theist, agnostic, or innocent with respect to any model of God. Assent to one model of God may rationally commit you to assent to another model, and same for the inverse (dissent of one commits you to dissent of another).

So when it comes to positions on God's existence, I want to know the following:

1) Which model of God is under consideration? ("Do you believe in God?" – Do I believe in what?)

2) Which model of belief or other doxastic attitude with respect to this God is under consideration? ("Do you believe in God?" – Do I what in God?)

3) How do we score degrees of that doxastic attitude, or give context to it? (Does this person believe in God with certainty? Do they have a considered, well-informed view on the topic? – "Do you believe in God?" – Yes, I believe in God, and the reason why is... Or, No, I don't believe in God, but I haven't thought much about the topic... Or, I'm certain that God doesn't exist because... etc.)