Now that the thread has apparently run dry, I’m reposting some comments I left over at Jim Hamilton’s blog.
steve hays March 31, 2011 at 11:56 am #
There’s a distinction between offensive and defensive apologetics. Hamilton’s is offering a personal testimony. That’s a variant on the argument from religious experience.
If, in fact, the Bible is what it says it is, then it’s possible, and, indeed, predictable, that many Christians will enjoy a veridical experience of the sort that Hamilton describes.
Of course, that’s unconvincing to an outsider, but that’s true of personal, first-person experience generally. You’re an outsider to my experience while I’m an outsider to your experience. Yet first-person experience is our only port of entry to the external world. So you can hardly discount all such claims without retreating into solipsism.
And the fact that it’s unconvincing to an outsider doesn’t mean you can’t have a veridical experience. It just means your first-person experience is inherently intransitive.
Likewise, to say one’s experience can be veridical doesn’t imply that every ostensible experience is veridical. Hence, the comparison with Mormonism fails to undercut Hamilton’s testimony without further argument. And further argument undercuts Mormonism.
Christian apologists often cite public evidence for Scripture. That furnishes common ground between believer and unbeliever.
However, the reasons that Christians have for being Christian aren’t reducible to common ground, as there is something distinctive about the Christian experience. That’s something one can only appreciate from the inside.
steve hays March 31, 2011 at 12:16 pm #
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Christianity is true. After all, Hamilton’s critics can’t reasonably claim that there’s a standing presumption against Christianity without begging the question.
Now, most folks aren’t intellectuals: including most Christians. Therefore, if the Christian God exists, then it must be possible to know or experience the Christian God without recourse to sophisticated arguments. Knowledge by acquaintance.
You may deny that the Christian God exists, but if he exists, then we’d expect Christians to have the type of experience to which Hamilton bears witness.
And by the same token, if Hamilton had a veridical experience of God, then he’s justified in believing God even if a second party who wasn’t privy to that experience may not be justified in believing God based on someone else’s ostensible experience. The subject of the experience can be warranted in his belief whether or not the same holds true for an outsider. Those are separate issues.
steve hays March 31, 2011 at 12:55 pm #
The argument from religious experience is just a special case of the argument from experience in general. Unless Hamilton’s critics are prepared to say personal experience is inherently suspect, that personal experience can’t be relied upon to access reality–a denial that reduces his critics to windowless monads–they will have to present far more targeted objections.
steve hays March 31, 2011 at 12:35 pm #
TPM
“How could such a method pick the Bible out as divinely inspired above the Book of Mormon? After all, Mormons also claim to be led directly from their study of BoM to an intuition that it is a true revelation.”
That comparison is equivocal. For one thing, since Mormon theism is radically different from Christian theism, any theory of divine inspiration in Mormon theology will be radically different from divine inspiration in Christian theology.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Mormon pantheon exists. Even if the Mormon scriptures were inspired, they wouldn’t be inerrant, given the nature of the Mormon pantheon. Finite men evolving into finite gods.
“The very computer you are using to write these posts testifies that on at least some subjects, modern scientists are extremely trustworthy.”
Well, if you wish to put a cynical interpretation on their motives, we could just as well say computer science testifies to the greed, rather than integrity, of computer scientists. The profession is very lucrative. Just look at Microsoft. Or Apple.
I’m not claiming that this is, in fact, what motivates computer science. Just pointing out your fallacious inference.
“Even the memories of eyewitnesses can and often do become distorted mere hours and days after the fact, to say nothing of decades.”
Of course, that’s a cliché. Sure, testimonial evidence can be unreliable. But by the same token, testimonial evidence can be highly reliable. Indeed, it’s because testimonial evidence is generally reliable that we can use that as a benchmark to test unreliable testimonial evidence.
There’s standard criteria for sifting testimonial evidence.
“You have set the bar way too high. Part of the reason why judgments of historicity are so uncertain about the Bible is because so much primary evidence is lacking.”
The Bible itself is primary evidence.
steve hays March 31, 2011 at 7:08 pm #
Thnuh Thnuh:
“THere are certain types of personal experience that can be classed as unreliable and can never be taken as the foundation for a worldview, even one’s own (I acknowledge my experience could at most be the foundation for my belief in that sense). I mean experiences like “sensing a presence.’”
But what if there’s a presence to be sensed? Take the sense of being stared at. Sometimes you have the sense of being stared at because…someone is staring at you.
Sure, you can also say there are times when you merely imagine someone is staring at you.
But in that case, it’s not the type of experience that’s unreliable. Rather, certain instances are unreliable. But the same can be said for sensory experience. Yet we wouldn’t say that because misperceptions are possible, the senses are systematically or even usually unreliable.
steve hays April 1, 2011 at 10:17 am #
TPM
“Human beings have well-documented perceptual weaknesses in certain environments. I’m not discounting all such claims, only claims that occur in circumstances and with regard to ostensible realities that should arouse our suspicion.”
Which begs the question of whether “ostensible realities” like God, angels, demons, prophets, &c., belong to the suspect category.
“Just because radical solipsism fails doesn’t mean the veridicality of every Christian religious experience is established.”
A straw man argument since my contention wasn’t predicated on the veridicality of “every” Christian religious experience. Try again.
“But unless we have other considerations that make the existence of the Christian God more likely, we have no reason to prefer this account of Dr. Hamilton’s experiences over a naturalistic alternative.”
i) Even if that were the case, so what? My experience needn’t count as evidence for what you ought to believe. But it can still count as evidence for what I ought to believe.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that a dreamer has a prophetic dream. It’s very specific. And it comes to pass. The dreamer has reason to take that seriously.
Now, if the dreamer tells you about his dream, you’re in a different situation. Should you take his word for it? That depends. It depends, in part, on whether you know him to be honest and clearheaded.
Since you didn’t have the dream, you don’t have the same type of warrant that he does. But your doubts don’t justify his doubting the experience.
“That may be true, but just because the subject CAN be warranted doesn’t say anything about the specific case. Again, there are environments and experiences in which human perception is quite unreliable.”
Those clichés don’t favor atheism over theism.
“No, the problem is that no such reason has been presented. Well, a reason has been given, but it’s not a very good one at all.”
A good reason for whom? It may not be a good reason for you, if you aren’t party to the experience, but it may be a perfectly good reason for the subject of the experience.
“I said nothing about a conviction of inerrancy, only of divine inspiration, whatever the nature of the divine. But if the Mormon story is true, Dr. Hamilton’s intuition of the trustworthiness and divine origin of Christian Scripture is undercut. So what’s the point of this comment?”
If (arguendo) the Mormon scriptures were inspired by fallible gods, then the Mormons scriptures would be unreliable. So it generates an internal dilemma. If they testify to fallible gods, then why believe their testimony?
“Whether they are greedy or not doesn’t matter. I wasn’t addressing their moral integrity, but their trustworthiness when it comes to the physical principles of computer science. The fact that they can make functioning computers shows that they know what they are talking about in that domain.”
Yet you also cited examples of scientific fraud. So your examples cancel each other out.
“Remember, my original post boiled down to the request for a positive, historically (i.e. testimonially) grounded defense of the inspiration of the Bible. If there is a case, I’d like to examine it.”
What are you asking for, exactly? A bibliography?
“My claim is that human perception is unreliable in certain specific circumstances. But I would also argue that even though human perception is generally reliable in ordinary, everyday situations, it still always defeasible.”
If human perception is “always” defeasible, then how can you detect misperception? What’s your standard of comparison? How can one defeasible perception correct for another defeasible perception?
steve hays April 2, 2011 at 9:51 am #
TPM
“I think if human cognitive faculties could reliably track such realities, there would be a lot more consensus about the contours of those realities and how we interact with them.”
Well, that’s circular inasmuch as people like you typically take ostensible experiences of that sort, not as evidence that there’s something to it, but as evidence that human cognitive faculties are unreliable in that regard.
“But I don’t see how that would make Dr. Hamilton more justified in holding to his apparently self-authenticating experience with the Bible.”
You’re confusing a justifiable belief with the justification of said belief. If I know something, then I’m justified in what I know whether or not I engage in a process of formal justification.
“It may count as SOME evidence, but surely is not the only or the most important portion of the relevant evidence. True, Dr. Hamilton’s self-authenticating experience with the Bible is SOME evidence in favor of its veridicality. But that evidence must be weighed against other considerations, including claims to self-authenticating experiences that imply metaphysical realities contradictory to Dr. Hamilton’s.”
You keep confusing a veridical experience with a veridical claim. If someone has a veridical experience, then, by definition, someone else can’t have a contradictory veridical experience. If someone has a veridical experience, then that experience is itself self-authenticating. The fact that someone else may be self-deluded about his experience doesn’t cast doubt on a genuinely veridical experience.
You need to distinguish between first-order knowledge (that I know), and second-order knowledge (how I know).
“My original point was simply that Dr. Hamilton had not given very good reasons for believing in the divine inspiration of the Bible.”
You keep repeating that claim without drawing elementary distinctions (see above).
“All that matters here is the source of the message and what it implies about ultimate realities, not the specific content of the message. An untrustworthy message from a god is still a message from a god, and if the Mormon is correct about the source of his intuition concerning the origin of the MoM, that refutes Christian metaphysics.”
If the message is about the source, then you can’t make that cut-and-dried distinction.
“I cited successful cases of detecting scientific fraud to show that, unlike those cases, we have little evidence outside the Bible to determine whether the biblical authors were trustworthy or not.”
If you always demand “outside” evidence, then that only pushes the question back a step. Why disbelieve biblical witnesses, but believe extrabiblical witnesses? If you don’t believe a witness, then why believe a witness to a witness?
“That’s a good start. Books, articles, etc. arguing for the reliability of the Bible on the basis of the standard criteria for evaluating testimony.”
Does that mean you haven’t acquainted yourself with the other side of the argument? If so, then aren’t your objections premature?
“Human perception is always defeasible, but it is not always defeated.”
In what respect is a correct perception defeasible?
steve hays April 5, 2011 at 3:56 pm #
TPM:
“Not at all. The suspicion that human faculties may be unreliable in these circumstances emerges quite reasonably from the contact between people who have widely varying accounts of the sacred. Have people from two different cultures describe a tree in the forest, and while there may be a different metaphysical background to their descriptions, you quickly see that they are talking about the same thing. This is not true of people’s descriptions of religious entities. I certainly do not start by assuming that these experiences are unreliable.”
Actually, most religious adherents don’t claim to be in direct contact with the divine. More commonly, a religious founder claims a numinous encounter. Religious experience is then mediated via a sacred text, or oral stories, or rituals, or the community of faith.
So it’s not as if most religious adherents are even claiming to describe their immediate experience of the divine.
Therefore, you’re analogy is fatally disanalogous.
“I’m a math teacher. If you wrote down only the final answers to problems on a math test, without showing how you got your answer, you would only get half-credit, if that. Insistence that you don’t have to show your work because you ‘know’ the right answers would get you nowhere.”
Well, as a math teacher you ought to know that great mathematicians like Andrew Wiles, Henri Poincaré, and Paul Cohen can intuit the solution before they can formally prove their solution. Likewise, Newton and Leibniz were winging it with their intuitive grasp of calculus. The loose ends had to be tied up later by patient, plodding mathematicians.
Same thing with a great chess player’s sight-of-the-board (e.g. Capablanca). Likewise, great physicists have physical intuition.
So, basically you’re telling us that if you had a precocious math genius in class, you’d flunk him.
“My goodness, it’s always an either-or with you. When presented with two accounts of the same event, the historian will compare them by various means to see which is more likely to be correct. There’s no a priori outcome here. For example, in comparing Luke to Josephus. I don’t automatically assume that where the two historians clash on the activities of Theudas, for example, that Josephus is write and Luke’s wrong. But without other accounts to compare to we have no way of deciding one way or the other.”
We already have that. Take the synoptic gospels. According to the conventional solution to the Synoptic Problem, Matthew and Luke made use of Mark. So we can see how Matthew and Luke handle primary sources. And their redaction of Mark is extremely conservative. They don’t take great liberties with Mark. They’re very faithful to that source.
I’ll revisit your bibliographical request later when I have the time.
steve hays April 6, 2011 at 9:43 am #
TPM:
“Can you point me to works by Christian historians who actually employ standard criteria for checking testimony instead of whatever slight, irrelevant strand of reasoning will get them the conclusion they want?”
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