Reading:
Plantinga Supplement - sent by email on Thursday
Plantinga, pp. 252-254 (the section on The Great Pumpkin Objection)
Pargetter, “Experience, Proper Basicality, and Belief in God”, pp. 256-260
Note: Your responses should focus on Pargetter’s critique.
Reading Guide to Pargetter
Pargetter compares Plantinga’s description of how many theists believe in God to the way in which Obi-Wan Kenobi believed in the Force. Pargetter helpfully gives you several examples of direct experiences that Plantinga thinks induce many religious people to believe in God.
The first section of Pargetter’s article concerns defeaters for the belief that God exists. I think the concept of a defeater is clear enough, but if you need help, the Glossary at the back of your text has an excellent definition. Pargetter considers 3 possible defeaters for the religious believer’s belief that God exists:
1. the prevalence of sophisticated atheism
2. the existence of evil
3. many people who are in the same or similar position as the religious believer who claims to have direct experience of God have never felt the presence of God
Pargetter claims that none of these facts can count as a defeater for the religious believer who claims to have experienced the presence of God. He argues that in order to determine whether belief in God is properly basic, we have to turn to a holistic evaluation of the religious believer’s system or network of beliefs (what Plantinga called the “noetic structure”). Specifically, we have to compare the religious believer’s system of beliefs to the system of beliefs he would have were he “to reject the belief that God exists” (259). On p. 260, Pargetter lists a few criteria by which to judge whether one system of beliefs is, holistically speaking, more rational than another.
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11 comments:
I thought Pargetter’s argument made sense until the last page when he was discussing “holistic rationality of the resulting overall belief system” and evaluating beliefs against each other which I really did not understand. The final paragraph which sums up his argument makes me wonder what he means by reliable because is anything really reliable? But I give him extra credit for the stars wars analogy.
I find Pargetter convincing until he begins to talk about experience. It seems he misses one of the most obvious problems with claims to religious experience. While he does discuss the experience of A and the non-experience of B he does not discuss the gross incompatibility of many religious experiences. Many Christians claim to directly experience God, while also claiming exclusivity of genuine religious experience, meaning to them, the experiences of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindu’s etc. are to be attributed to something else. If this is the case, it seems to undermine the argument that their own religious experiences are an appropriate basis for their religious belief as they already acknowledge that entire communities can be convinced of a religious experience that is in fact false. Thus, if religious experience is a basis for belief in God, one must believe that the majority of religious communities that claim to have religious experiences are all correct. This would be something like Baha’i, a religion that believes the revelations of Hindus, Christians, Muslims, etc. are all actual revelations from God. However, how could the claim that Allah should be worshiped exclusively not contradict the claim that there are many gods? Thus even Baha’i is ruled out as a logical possibility. Thus, religious experience cannot be viewed as the basis for belief, but can still be seen as part of a faith that is convincing for other reasons.
What I have issues with is that Pargetter says that "a reasonably large group of theists who claim to have experiences of this kind..." when speaking of those A's who have felt the presences of God. That's all fine and dandy, but the range, degree and type of these experiences have to differ. Basically, I do not see how it is possible to classify all these supposed experiences as one in the same thing. How do these people know they are experience God. What if they are different Gods, what if it is a flying spaghetti monster? How can we be sure that these experiences are experiences at all besides the testimony of regular people.
Kudos to Pargetter for using Star Wars analogies instead of highminded, intellectual, complexity that I struggle to understand.
Pargetter has convinced me that properly basic beliefs can be rational, but only through experience based reinforcement. The direct experience of God is enough to refute the defeater ideas. Now, I even buy the idea that the existence of evil is not a defeater of the properly basic claim. The fact that the dark side of the force can coexist with the light side illuminates the idea that evil does not lend itself to a godless existence.
After reading this essay I began to wonder, if God had never revealed his own existence to Adam and Eve, Abraham, Noah, or any other prophet, how would someone know about God at all? (How would any jedi/sith know about the force without some revelation by the force itself?) I find myself believing that people would somehow come up with the idea of God on their own. Maybe not necessarily in the Christian sense, but they would come up with something. (Maybe a Great Pumpkin if they existed in a Pumpkin based agricultural society.) But since people have experienced God in direct and sometimes indirect ways, I have to ask myself whether or not I believe them. A simple yes is enough to validate God's exist. Ideally, I would hope that God would just manifest before me so that I no longer had to wonder.
I started to wonder much the same thing, if these arguments are based- and they seem to be- on experience. If nobody had ever "experienced" God, would we have thoght there was a God? If we then did, how would Pargetter's argument even work? It seems like everything in it is hinged on experience. If you take out that word, there is nothing comprehensible in the entire argument. I'm still having a hard time understanding the concept of being "properly basic," however, which might be skewing my general understanding of this response.
Pargetter systematically explores Plantinga's argument, but bases his logic primarily around a fundamentally flawed perspective: any altered system of belief that is more rational than its predecessor is evidently correct. The entirety of Pargetter's argument is based on such contrast and comparison. Although some ideas and arguments may be more rational than others, this cannot be used solely to determine whether or not such ideas are fundamentally correct. I really like where Ed and Logan are going with this train of thought on the more general argument. Any belief based on empirical observation must have an origin and divine revelation stands as the only method by which humanity could have initially experienced God. These experiences are highly subjective to the individual and must be explored logically. I don't think I can fully stomach Pargetter's stance on the equivocation of testimony and experience. Just because a friend tells me about his acid trip does not mean I truly know what it feels like to drop acid. How can abstract knowledge of something alter ones system of belief in such a drastic way?
Ok, so basically what I'm getting from Pargetter is that the variation of individual experience is not a proof against (defeater) of the existence of god. Also, that evaluation of whether or not a belief in god rests on the holistic usefulness of the entire belief system which follows it. Once again I find a gap in the argument being put forth and the logical conclusion. Pargetter is arguing that a belief in god can be perfectly rational and based (at least in part) on experience, yet he then implies that the entire theology stemming from such a belief is also equally rational. He uses (quite poorly) the Force as an example. The Force is not a religion, it's simply a power which can be manipulated. Yes, Han Solo didn't believe in the utility of the Force, but he certainly couldn't deny it's existence when he saw it's application. I happen to have experiences which seem to defy logic, events which just don't seem possible. For example, hitting every red light in town when you're in a hurry, and getting nothing but green lights when you're way too early. I attribute this to a guy named Murphy. I don't however make the claim that such an attribution is rational.
Belief in God aside, when you are a child and your parents talk about life when they were a child. Their beliefs are from experiences however your beliefs would be based on hear-say. Yet we as kids believe on blind faith that our parents are telling the truth. I think most religious believers start out in the same way. They believe with blind faith but as life goes on they experince God as they find him to be the cause or reason for why things occur thus strengthening their belief in God. Furthermore, how would one explain miracles? Do they actually happen and if so can their cause be explained by science?
I am not an avid star wars fan by any means, but from what I do remember, there were pretty obvious mircles (by that i mean occurances that would not fit in in the normal word). The force from what I recall had more definitive reasons to believe in it. The comparison to me doesn't do much for the argument. It's like a dog believing from experiece that I will reward him for good behavior. Just because there have been things to make to dog come to believe in what I do for him does not necessarily grant him full capacity to believe I will continue.
Pargetter makes a great point. Belief in God cannot ultimately be defeated by an atheistic perspective. Thus, it would seem logical to look within the argument itself froma non-biased perspective. I don't like the article because he reaches a conclusion but does nothing in the way of actively supporting it. Also, i imagine that, in the context of theology, it would be exceedingly difficult to examine religion from the standpoint of someone who's reliability is not undermined by their beliefs.
The first part of the argument makes sense. I think that peoples belief in God should be individual, but like we discussed in class, it often is like a little kid believing because of mom and dad. If you believe in God because of someone elses experiences, how do you know that it's God? I mean some people can speak in tongues or claim miracles in their life, but I do not think this should be the basis for someone else to believe in it.
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