I don’t trust the intellectual tradition of this argumentative style.
It’s not obvious that anyone’s asking you to trust anything? Surely those offering arguments are just asking you to assess an argument on its merits, rather than by the family of thinkers the argument emerges from?
But my impression of modern apologetics is primarily one of rationalization, not the source of religion’s understanding of meaning, but a post-facto justification.
I’m reasonably involved in the apologetics community. I think there is a good deal of rationalization going on, probably more so than in other communities, though all communities do this to some extent. However I don’t think we need to worry about the intentions of those offering the arguments. We can just assess the offered arguments one by one and see whether they are successful?
William Lane Craig (who I watched a bunch as a young teenager), who sees argument and reason as secondary to his belief
I don’t think the argument you quote is quite as silly as it sounds, a lot depends on your view within epistemology of the internalism/externalism debate. Craig subscribes to reformed epistemology, where one can be warranted in believing something without having arguments for the belief.
This doesn’t seem to me to be as silly as it first sounds. Imagine we simulated beings and then just dropped true beliefs into their heads about complicated maths theorems that they’d have no normal way of knowing. It seems to me that the simulated beings would be warranted to believe these facts (as they emerged from a reliable belief forming process) even if they couldn’t give arguments for why those maths theorems are the case.
This is what Craig and other reformed epistemologists are saying that God does when the Holy Spirit creates belief in God in people even if they can’t offer arguments for it being the case. Given that Craig believes this, he doesn’t think that we need arguments if we have the testimony of the Holy Spirit and that’s why he’s happy to talk about reason being non-magisterial.
My high-confidence understanding of the whole space of apologetics is that the process generating them is, on a basic level, not systematically correlated with reality
I have sympathy for your concern, this seems to be a world in which motivated reasoning might naturally be more present than in chemistry. However, I don’t know how much work you’ve done in philosophy of religion or philosophy more generally, but my assessment is that philosophy of religion is as well argued and thoughtful as many of the other branches of philosophy. As a result I don’t have this fear that motivated reasoning wipes the field out. As I defended before, we can look at each argument on its own merit.
This is my response to your meta-level response.
It’s not obvious that anyone’s asking you to trust anything? Surely those offering arguments are just asking you to assess an argument on its merits, rather than by the family of thinkers the argument emerges from?
I’m reasonably involved in the apologetics community. I think there is a good deal of rationalization going on, probably more so than in other communities, though all communities do this to some extent. However I don’t think we need to worry about the intentions of those offering the arguments. We can just assess the offered arguments one by one and see whether they are successful?
I don’t think the argument you quote is quite as silly as it sounds, a lot depends on your view within epistemology of the internalism/externalism debate. Craig subscribes to reformed epistemology, where one can be warranted in believing something without having arguments for the belief.
This doesn’t seem to me to be as silly as it first sounds. Imagine we simulated beings and then just dropped true beliefs into their heads about complicated maths theorems that they’d have no normal way of knowing. It seems to me that the simulated beings would be warranted to believe these facts (as they emerged from a reliable belief forming process) even if they couldn’t give arguments for why those maths theorems are the case.
This is what Craig and other reformed epistemologists are saying that God does when the Holy Spirit creates belief in God in people even if they can’t offer arguments for it being the case. Given that Craig believes this, he doesn’t think that we need arguments if we have the testimony of the Holy Spirit and that’s why he’s happy to talk about reason being non-magisterial.
I have sympathy for your concern, this seems to be a world in which motivated reasoning might naturally be more present than in chemistry. However, I don’t know how much work you’ve done in philosophy of religion or philosophy more generally, but my assessment is that philosophy of religion is as well argued and thoughtful as many of the other branches of philosophy. As a result I don’t have this fear that motivated reasoning wipes the field out. As I defended before, we can look at each argument on its own merit.