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Are causes of belief reasons for belief? Silver on evil, religious experience, and theism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 May 2008

ERIC SNIDER
ERIC SNIDER
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Bethel University, St Paul, MN55112
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Abstract

David Silver has argued that there is an illegitimate circularity in Plantinga's account of how a Christian theist can defend herself against the potential defeater presented by Paul Draper's formulation of the problem of evil. The way out of the circle for the theist, thinks Silver, would be by adopting a kind of evidentialism: she needs to make an appeal to evidence that is independent of the reasons she has for holding theistic belief in the first place. I shall argue that Silver's argument is unsuccessful, mainly because he does not get Plantinga's thought right. Silver's confusion is in taking causes of belief as reasons for belief, and in failing to account for the impact of belief holism and our web of beliefs on the very hope for independent reasons.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , June 2008 , pp. 185 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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References

Notes

1 Draper, Paul ‘Pain and pleasure: an evidential problem for theists’, Nous, 23 (1989), 331–350CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Silver, David ‘Religious experience and the evidential argument from evil’, Religious Studies, 38 (2002), 339–353CrossRefGoogle Scholar. References to Silver's article are in-text.

3 Alvin Plantinga Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), referred to in text and notes as WCB.

4 Silver, David ‘Religious experience and the facts of religious pluralism’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 49 (2001), 1–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Silver may be confusing here being rational and being warranted. Belief in God is proper function rational, internally and externally, even if I am aware that belief in God is evidentially challenged (parallel the Maynard the cat example in Plantinga WCB, 480). In contrast, ‘a belief has warrant if and only if it is produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly in a congenial epistemic environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at the production of true belief’ (Plantinga WCB, 498; cf 153–161).

6 See C. A. J. Coady Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

7 Draper ‘Pain and pleasure’, 331.

8 See Plantinga WCB, 476; the data that is alleged to be a challenge to belief in God must be the sort of data that theism is in the business of explaining.

9 See ibid., especially chs 6–7.

10 Here I follow a type of Augustinian account.

11 Richard Swinburne The Existence of God, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 245–257. Perhaps I am also importing into the view I develop in this paragraph hints from John Hick's soul-making theodicy from Evil and the God of Love (New York NY: Harper and Row, 1966). I do not myself know where or how; but I have this vague feeling that something of Hick's view is lurking in my account.

12 I am here especially following Plantinga WCB, 172–186.

13 The thoughts in the second half of this paragraph were suggested to me from e-mail correspondence with Alvin Plantinga.

14 I am summarizing the extended A/C model from Plantinga WCB, 184–186, as well as chs 7–8.

15 This way of putting it was suggested to me by Silver in comments on a draft of this paper.

16 I am not claiming to endorse all the details of Davidson's holism or of Quine's conceptions of beliefs. I am exploiting their thoughts for notions that seem rather common sense to me.

17 Donald Davidson ‘The emergence of thought’, in his Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 123–134; quotation from 124, 127. Also in the same volume ‘What is present to the mind’, 53–67, see 65, and ‘Rational animals’, 95–105, see 98.

18 For a bit of levity, what should I do if my belief in the reliability of testimony was shown wrong by expert psychologists? Accept their testimony, or reject it?

19 Imagine a contemporary scientist, much of whose work is shaped by a naturalist perspective; hardly any potential defeaters are going to have defeating potential, and so be taken with much seriousness. The onus is very high indeed.

20 Alvin Plantinga Warrant and Proper Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) ch. 12.

21 I could have it now without looking now. Two hours ago when I looked, there was snow on the ground. I am aware of the weather report not expecting a major warm-up today, and so on. So I have the belief without looking. But in this latter case my belief is based upon other beliefs I have. Of course when I look out the window and believe there is snow on the ground, that belief itself might warrant someone in inferring various other beliefs I seem committed to: that my window is not a trompe l'oeil painting, that the stuff on the ground is not flour or fine Styrofoam, that I am a thing that thinks, and on and on. But none of these other beliefs that I might be committed to are my reasons for my belief that there is snow on the ground.

22 I am grateful to Alvin Plantinga and David Silver for generous and penetrating comments and criticism on early drafts of this paper.