God and rational discourse

Before we can have a reasonable conversation about God, everyone playing has to pass the Defeasibility Test. A defeasible belief is one that is responsive to evidence, where “evidence” is used broadly to include empirical and conceptual considerations. Your belief is defeasible if you are prepared to revise it in the light of new evidence. Ask yourself this: Are there any considerations, arguments, evidence, or reasons, even hypothetically that could possibly lead me to change my mind about God? Is it a possible outcome that in carefully and thoughtfully reflecting on the broadest and most even body of evidence that I can grasp, that I would come to think that my current view about God is mistaken? If your belief isn’t defeasible, then engaging in discourse about God’s existence (or anything else) is, rationally speaking, a fruitless waste of time.

I also take something like fallibilism to be true. That is, it is possible for a person to have a fully justified but false belief. There are cases where someone has fulfilled all of his epistemic duties in gathering and considering evidence and he has drawn a reasonable conclusion from that evidence, but the conclusion still turns out to be wrong. To deny fallibilism is to claim that it is impossible to be fully justified in believing what is false. Given what we know about human cognitive systems, that’s just not plausible.

For lots of people, it turns out that even though they engage in what appears to be rational discourse about the arguments for and against God’s existence, their belief is not defeasible. So a preliminary question to having one of these discussions is: What is the relationship, as you see it, between reasoning about God and your belief in God? That is, is your belief in God more fundamental than your commitment to believe what reason and evidence indicates; or are you prepared, if the evidence, reasoning, and argument demands it, to abandon your view of God as irrational? The question is of obvious importance because you enter into a dialogue concerning the question of God's existence in bad faith if ultimately you don't really care what the evidence is. If the believer places a higher premium on believing than anything else, including being reasonable about counter evidence and arguments, then he’s just engaging in sophistry when he engages in dialogue.

Nicholas Wolterstorff says, in the remarkably titled Reason within the Bounds of Religion,

“The religious beliefs of the Christian scholar ought to function as control beliefs within his devising and weighing of theories. . . . Since his fundamental commitment to following Christ ought to be decisively ultimate in his life, the rest of his life ought to be brought into harmony with it. As control, the belief-content of his authentic commitment ought to function both negatively and positively. Negatively, the Christian scholar ought to reject certain theories on the ground that they conflict or do not comport well with the belief-content of his authentic commitment. Why is it that one must first run an evidential test on Scripture before one is justified in accepting it? Does this not fundamentally subordinate revelation to reason? What then is left of the authority of Scripture?

William Lane Craig insists that nothing could possibly counter indicate the truth of the Gospels because of a self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit in his heart that gives him knowledge independent of all questions of evidence.

Believing is somehow “self-authenticating” for them. It “carries its own evidence.” As they see it, it is a mistake to think that believing itself must be held to standards of evidence or rationality. Rather, our standards of evidence and rationality must answer to our belief in God.

Alvin Plantinga has similarly denied that belief in God must be justified in terms of other more basic claims that we allege to know better or with more confidence than we know God. Belief in God is the axiomatic starting point, not the result of reasoning.

The Talbot School of Theology has this doctrinal statement:

"The Bible, consisting of all the books of the Old and New Testaments, is the Word of God, a supernaturally given revelation from God Himself, concerning Himself, His being, nature, character, will and purposes; and concerning man, his nature, need and duty and destiny. The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are without error or misstatement in their moral and spiritual teaching and record of historical facts. They are without error or defect of any kind."

Consider some questions about these approaches: How is it that the belief can be taken up by one of these believers in a way that 1) subordinates reason and puts the consideration of evidence as secondary, and 2) is intellectually honest and respectable? If reason and evidence are subordinated, then what can keep the belief from first being acquired in a way that is arbitrary, prejudicial, and unprincipled? If someone’s belief is adopted and sustained in this contra-rational fashion, how can anyone take that believer’s belief seriously? How can someone with this sort of belief maintain that what he’s doing has intellectual integrity and that the rest of us ought to take his rationalizations seriously?

This person has said, in effect, “I have adopted this belief without regard for reasons or evidence, and I value being intellectually responsible about the powerful argument you are making less than I value my continued belief in God, so I will continue believing as I started, unaffected.” At this point, of course, there’s really nothing left to be said for the rest of us. If someone is resolved to believe at all costs, then nothing else that any skeptic could say, no matter how thoughtful or persuasive can undermine that stubbornness. At this point, we should be prepared to conclude that someone has simply left the rational thought game and must be considered a lost cause.

Matt McCormick
Department of Philosophy
Sacramento State