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Religious Disagreement and Epistemic Intuitions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2017

Michael Bergmann
Michael Bergmann*
Affiliation:
Purdue University
*
bergmann@purdue.edu
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Abstract

Religious disagreement is, quite understandably, viewed as a problem for religious belief. In this paper, I consider why religious disagreement is a problem—why it is a potential defeater for religious belief—and I propose a way of dealing with this sort of potential defeater. I begin by focusing elsewhere—on arguments for radical skepticism. In section 1, I consider skeptical arguments proposed as potential defeaters for all of our perceptual and memory beliefs and explain what I think the rational response is to such potential defeaters, emphasizing the way epistemic intuitions are involved in both the skeptical arguments and my recommended response. In section 2, I discuss the way in which peer disagreement—on any topic—is a potential defeater for our beliefs, highlighting the conditions under which recognized disagreement is a successful defeater and those under which it isn't. In the third section, I consider how to use a section-1 type of response to deal with a section-2 type of defeater for religious belief.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 81: Religious Epistemology , October 2017 , pp. 19 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2017 

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References

1 But see Alston, William, The Reliability of Sense Perception (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)Google Scholar and Fumerton, Richard, Metaepistemology and Skepticism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995)Google Scholar for helpful discussion.

2 Ibid.

3 Reid, Thomas, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, ed. Brookes, Derek (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002 [1785]): 452 & 480 Google Scholar.

4 Ibid. 433.

5 Ibid. 462.

6 For more on this view of Reid's, see Bergmann, Michael, Justification without Awareness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006): 206–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.  Contrary to what I say there, I now think that the experiential basis of commonsense beliefs is a certain claim's seeming absurd—a seeming that is in some way involved in or connected with the emotion of ridicule—not that emotion itself (we have the emotion because the claim seems absurd).

7 Tolhurst, William, ‘Seemings’, American Philosophical Quarterly 35 (1998), 293–302 Google Scholar.

8 Ibid. 299.  For further discussions of what seemings are see Bergmann, Michael, ‘Externalist Justification and the Role of Seemings’, Philosophical Studies 166 (2013), 163–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 See Greco, John, Putting Skeptics In Their Place (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Pryor, James, ‘The Skeptic and the Dogmatist’, Noûs 34 (2000), 517–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 See Bergmann 2013 op. cit. where I defend externalism and reject Phenomenal Conservatism, despite my friendliness to talk of seemings.

11 See Chisholm, Roderick, ‘The Problem of the Criterion’, The Foundations of Knowing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 68–9Google Scholar.  Particularism as Chisholm understands it should not be confused with moral particularism of the sort defended by Dancy, Jonathan, Ethics without Principles, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 There is more to be said about this than I can get into here.  For an initial statement, without endorsement, of some aspects of this line of thought in connection with moral beliefs, see Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, Moral Skepticisms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 74–77 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.  Similar points can be made in connection with beliefs about epistemic matters.  In the abstract, there are the possibilities of basing beliefs about epistemic value on authoritative testimony or on some ‘inference to the best explanation’ arguments for realism about epistemic value and for the reliability of our beliefs about epistemic matters.  But in fact, such beliefs are, I think, typically noninferentially based on epistemic intuition.

13 Deflecting a defeater is to be distinguished from defeating a defeater.  Defeating a defeater (on one natural construal) causes that defeater to lose its defeating power.  Deflecting a defeater is different: it prevents a potential defeater from having any defeating power to begin with.

14 It might seem true to the skeptic that, in such a situation, rationality requires me to give up those perceptual and memory beliefs.  But that's because the skeptic doesn't have veridical epistemic intuitions (more on this in the next subsection).

15 This distinction is introduced by Plantinga, Alvin in his Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 110–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 For further discussion see Bergmann 2006 op. cit. and Bergmann 2013 op. cit.

17 But, for some supportive presentations of this kind of objection, see Weinberg, Jonathan et al. , ‘Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions’, Philosophical Topics 29 (2001), 429–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Alexander, Joshua et al. , ‘The “Unreliability” of Epistemic Intuitions’, Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy, eds. Machery, Edouard and O'Neill, Elizabeth (New York: Routledge, 2014), 128–45Google Scholar.  For some replies to these kinds of objections, see Bengson, John, ‘Experimental Attacks on Intuitions and Answers’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (2013), 495–532 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nagel, Jennifer, ‘Epistemic intuitions’, Philosophy Compass 2 (2007), 792–819 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nagel, Jennifer, ‘Intuitions and Experiments: A defense of the case method’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (2012), 495–527 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Boyd, Kenneth and Nagel, Jennifer, ‘The Reliability of Epistemic Intuitions’, Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy, eds. Machery, Edouard and O'Neill, Elizabeth (New York: Routledge, 2014), 109–27Google Scholar.

18 For a nice example of this see Fumerton op. cit. 50–51.

19 See Bergmann 2006 op. cit. 179–211.

20 See Bergmann, Michael, ‘Religious Disagreement and Rational Demotion’, Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, ed. Kvanvig, Jonathan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)Google Scholar, n. 2 for further discussion.

21 See ibid. 26 for further discussion.

22 This implies that unjustified beliefs can defeat justified ones. See Bergmann 2006 op. cit. 163–8 for some discussion of this.

23 For convenience, I'll refer to cases where a person is viewed as an epistemic inferior without first being viewed as an epistemic peer or better as cases of demoting, even if strictly speaking, there is no demotion in such a case from a peer or better to an inferior.

24 Thanks to Nichole Smith and Joel Ballivian for pressing me to clarify the ideas in this paragraph.

25 This is an oft-discussed case in the literature on disagreement.  See Christensen, David, ‘Epistemology of Disagreement: The Good News’, Philosophical Review 116 (2007), 187–217 CrossRefGoogle Scholar for an early discussion of it.

26 I introduced this case in Bergmann 2015 op. cit. 28.

27 This is a slightly altered version of an example from Plantinga 2000 op. cit. 450.

28 Alston, William, Perceiving God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 14–28 Google Scholar.

29 Plantinga seems to have theistic seemings in mind in his 2000 op. cit. 182–3 when he discusses the nature of the experiences involved in the operation of the sensus divinitatus, which produces belief in God.  There he notes that what such experiences have in common is that they all include doxastic experience.  And it is clear that what Plantinga thinks of as doxastic experience is the sort of thing that is involved in having a seeming.  See Plantinga 2000 op. cit. 110–11 and Plantinga, , Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 190–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Plantinga 2000 op. cit. 174.

31 As Plantinga writes (ibid. 250): ‘We read Scripture, or something presenting scriptural teaching, or hear the gospel preached, or are told of it by parents, or encounter a scriptural teaching as the conclusion of an argument (or conceivably even as an object of ridicule), or in some other way encounter a proclamation of the Word. What is said simply seems right; it seems compelling; one finds oneself saying, “Yes, that's right, that's the truth of the matter; this is indeed the word of the Lord”.’

32 Peirce, Charles Sanders, ‘A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God’, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce: Volumes V and VI, eds. Hartshorne, Charles and Weiss, Paul (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1965 [1908]), 6.452–85Google Scholar.

33 Plantinga, Alvin, Where the Conflict Really Lies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 240–264 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Audi, Robert, The Good in the Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 45–6Google Scholar.

35 Sosa, Ernest, ‘The Epistemology of Disagreement’, Social Epistemology, eds. Haddock, Adrian et al. (Oxford University Press, 2010), 278–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Oppy, Graham, ‘Disagreement’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 68 (2010), 183–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Tucker, Chris, ‘Phenomenal Conservatism and Evidentialism in Religious Epistemology’, Evidence and Religious Belief, eds. VanArragon, Raymond and Clark, Kelly James (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 52–73 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Alston 1991 op. cit. and Alston, William, ‘Knowledge of God’, Faith, Reason, and Skepticism, ed. Hester, Marcus (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 6–49 Google Scholar.

38 Plantinga 2000 op. cit.

39 Thanks to Joel Ballivian and John Greco for pressing me to clarify the points made in this paragraph.

40 I.e., emotionally secure, focused on others, and adept at respectfully and compassionately negotiating the complexities of human interactions and relationships.

41 See Bergmann 2015 op. cit. 41–42 for further discussion of this point.

42 For some discussion of arguments from evil that lends support to this claim, see Plantinga 2000 op. cit. 458–99; Alston, William, ‘The Inductive Argument from Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition’, Philosophical Perspectives 5 (1991): 29–67 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bergmann, Michael, ‘Skeptical Theism and the Problem of Evil’, The Oxford Handbook to Philosophical Theology, eds. Flint, Thomas and Rea, Michael (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 374–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 It's true that, in light of these virtues had by many atheists, things look better for atheism than they otherwise would.  But of course theists have these same considerations in support of their own position and they have (in addition) their theistic seemings.

44 What about theistic belief that is not based on strong theistic seemings and is not supported by strong epistemic intuitions about the veridicality of those theistic seemings?  Depending on how weak the theistic and relevant epistemic seemings are, it may be that disagreement over theism results in a defeater for such theistic belief.  For more on this, see Bergmann 2015 op. cit. 53–5.

45 For more discussion of the question of how people who disagree can reasonably view each other, see Bergmann 2015 op. cit. 42–53 and Bergmann, Michael, ‘Rational Disagreement after Full Disclosure’, Episteme 6 (2009), 336–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 For helpful comments, I want to thank the audiences at the University of Oxford, DePauw University, the University of Notre Dame, Indiana University, the University of Missouri, and the Canadian Philosophical Association meeting at the University of Ottawa. This work was supported by a research fellowship from The Experience Project funded by The John Templeton Foundation in partnership with the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  I'm grateful to these institutions for their support.