The Argument from Religious Experience

Inference to the Best Explanation1.There are three issues: i. Cognitivism of Moralityii. Knowing the truth content of what is “good”iii. Given the truth content of “good”, we can make inferences about God’s actionsPro is claiming all three of these issues are resolved, which I argue is patently absurd and I fail to see how cognitivism is implicitly assumed. Moreover, moral cognitivism doesn’t entail knowing the content of what “good” is, it only entails that there is a coherent concept which we label “good”. Even cognitivists implicitly agree due to the acknowledgement of moral disagreements e.g. with relativists, or different realism theories. It simply does not follow that God’s morality has *anything* to do with human morality. What is “good” according to God inherently has nothing to do with what we would regard as “good” via our ethical systems. It’s a blatent equivocation. It is clearly question begging, since God would need to exist before we would know what his nature and thus what “good” is.2. Pro attempts to forward the notion of theism’s simplicity…. by adding complexity. The natural world evidently exists, thus positing the countless natural laws etc. is not an assumption, it’s a verified fact, and thus does not factor into the law of parsimony. Pro ignores that theism posits an additional multiplicative entity onto the already existing natural world. We know the natural world exists, which is all that naturalism proposes, we do not know that something on top of the natural world, let alone a very specific something exists – that is the extra complexity/assumption that naturalism simply doesn’t make. Pro attempts to appeal to brute facts, but why couldn’t the naturalist posit the natural world as a singular brute fact. It doesn’t get Pro anywhere to assert things since they can be equally be asserted for naturalism and naturalism will always wind up being the simpler explanation due to never needing to make that extra assumption of an additional entity/attribute. Moreover Pro ignores that there are a whole host of supernatural possibilities that are not theistic that themselves could ground the world in one brute fact. The fact that Pro is arguing specifically for an intelligent and good God. Assumptions after assumptions. By this criteria solipsism is superior to both naturalism and supernaturalism, yes, it doesn’t pass the other criterea however. 3. Pro drops my argument that naturalism explains this diversity very naturally and elegantly. Moreover it does it in a testable manner. Pro has to resort to piling on more assumptions (thus violating the second criteria yet again) regarding God to explain the perceived diversity. Moreover if Pro can make truth claims about God’s motives (as he did in response to criterea #1), then surely a “good” god would not yield ambiguous and contradictory experiences of her. Pro cannot have his cake and eat it. In any case, Pro’s defence is speculative, multiplicative and ad hoc. Exactly the point I made from the start.4. We have pre-existing knowledge of naturalism, we have no pre-existing knowledge of a God existing. It’s that simple. I can reference science journals with information of naturalistic pathways to hallucinations etc. Pro does not have that same luxury of citing papers of “Divine interventions of the mind”. We have background knowledge of naturalism, we have no background knowledge of supernaturalism. Pro completely skips over this point which I made in R2. Virtually all the posited elements of metaphysical naturalism (the observed natural world) are within our background knowledge. The posited elements of theistic supernaturalism, clearly is not. It’s not a matter of contradicting or not.5. Pro defends against this criteria by violating the 2nd criteria...SummaryPro drops virtually all my points in favour of naturalism via. abduction. Pro is at best hoping for a tie in this argument, but metaphysical naturalism clearly champions in every single criterion.Argument from Religious ExperienceOverviewPro drops all my points regarding the epistemological/ontological divide. He flagrantly skips over this distinction over and over again, and thus already throws his argument on dubious ground.“If I have good reason for thinking E is veridical, then that is merely saying that E exists.”Right here is where Pro’s entire case collapses, and the clearest jump from epistemological (“good reason”) and ontological (“saying that E exists”). Pro needs to show that “good reason” means logically “more likely than not”, which just pushed back the epistemic/ontological divide back one stage further, and buries it into another term/premise.PFJ“Having PFJ for belief that God exists is sufficient if one does not have defeaters for the belief.”Pro grossly equivocates between having PFJ with having sufficient justification (addressed in P5), it’s patently false. Prima facie justification says nothing about ontology, so it cannot in principle be a candidate for sufficient justification. Moreover sufficient justification is only correct if and only if it entails ontologically that God is more likely to exist than not. Having bad justification does give one more justification than they previously had, but that’s not the same as saying that having this bad justification is sufficient to make claims about ontology.We may find random smudges that people attribute to UFO’s from aliens, clearly that are PFJ evidence in favour of aliens existing, and clearly not all UFO pictures have absolute defeaters in practice – but that doesn’t mean one is sufficiently justified in believing aliens exist based on one photograph of something round hovering in the air. A sufficient standard of justification needs to be reached first. Pro drops my points that sense experience is evidently not based on Type-PCT and PFJ like Pro ssumes, and the experience of reality compared to religious experience are not the same, one is reliable, the other is not. I didn’t just argue that some intuitive notions are incorrect outside of everyday middle-world experience, I argued that virtually all of them are. Quantum mechanics, special relativity, neuroscience, the physical sciences etc. are entirely empirical based endeavours (for good reason), and very much counter-intuitive (especially GR and QM, the most fundamental physics of our universe). And this is just within the natural world! Let alone when we apply them to the putative supernatural. The chances of our intuitions being relevant to these situations is virtually nil. Intuitions are indeed very much guilty until proven innocent outside of the everyday context.Type-PCTPremise 4Already addressed largely in the previous section. Pro completely fails to uphold the premise:“If S has PFJ for belief that p and there are no defeaters, then S has justified belief that p”He merely asserts it and falls back on his defeater qualifier, which completely misses the point. It simply does not follow that PFJ with no defeaters entails sufficient justification, ignoring this critical point is pretty compelling against Pro’s case. We don’t have background knowledge of the supernatural, thus we are ignorant of it even if it did exist. Making claims in ignorance is patently unsound, and Pro concedes that outside of background knowledge we simply will not be correct. He ignores the implicit premise and fails to sustain it:"If the experience is not verdical, then there will exist defeater(s)"Premise 1Pro drops my arguments that we interact and model the world in our minds differently to Type-PCT, thus Pro’s rebuttal to this is completely moot. We form models of reality which we shape with continued experience with the world, which forms our background knowledge. When beliefs are falsified, our models change. This is our best model of PFJ we have, Pro simply argues by assertion to the contrary.Pro fails to appreciate that this is a result of the internal/external divide, basic beliefs say nothing about the external, or what is daesin. Con’s model of how we come to believe things is far too oversimplistic (necessarily so in order to draw a halfway decent analogy which religious experiences can reside in).Premise 2Pro drops my point regarding the sharpshooter fallacy, that common elements of what we define as “religious” would of course be expected from purely the selection process. Pro needs to establish serious common features, like one would when making claims about the existence of something in reality. Pro again tries to have his cake and eat it by arguing that we both would and would not expect strongly common features. I could do what Pro has done this debate and appeal to intuition, but I will not.Pro’s argument regarding the Buffalo only regards how one forms preconceived ideas and categorisations about something, it says nothing about is empirically observed about the concrete object in question. We are contrasting features what people observe (e.g. seeing Jesus, Vishnu, etc.). Moreover Pro drops my arguments that alien abductions, flying experiences, etc would also qualify as “well established experiences” Premise 5Pro’s argument here ignores my previous arguments about how we make models of reality. Thus, I can freely concede that a sense experience that is entirely personal, subjective, and not shared does indeed count against your belief in its validity. If I am seeing something others do not see via. sense experience, then I have serious reason to doubt it is valid e.g. hallucinations.Furthermore, Pro simply contradicts himself when we refer to the content of other people’s experiences. If we assume solipsism is false, then we trust what other people say is what they are perceiving, but this is completely different to Type-PCT, since we are looking for empirical confirmation (i.e. my perceiving the statue predicts that my colleague will also see it) – Type-PCT makes no such predictive statement.Final WordI leave voters with one clean fact to mull over… The dress is blue!