Mike Licona has had a few very interesting debates with Bart Ehrman about the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus, they are on youtube if anyone is interested. I am currently listening to this one.

Certainty can be a tricky word here, as it can be used to refer to a psychological state--a belief so strongly held that it cannot be given up--or an epistemic state--a belief that, given the state of the world and our evidence or knowledge of the world, cannot be false or must be true.

I think what you are identifying here is that Naked_Rectitude probably has the psychological state of certainty (or something close to it) regarding certain claims of Christianity. I'm not sure that Naked_Rectitude would disagree with this. However, it doesn't follow (logically) that he thereby also believes that he is in the epistemic state of certainty as well. In fact, he might not even think that he "knows" (in the epistemic sense) that these claims are true, while at the same time being (psychologically) certain that they are true. You might define faith as covering this distance between the strength with which you hold a belief and the epistemic strength of the justification for that belief.

However, I think there are a couple of underlying assumption that might be the real source of disagreement. Some philosophers have claimed that knowledge is a norm of assertion. What this means is that it is a pragmatic implication of asserting that p that you know that p. Thus, insofar as Naked_Rectitude seems to be asserting that Jesus is the Son of God it might be that he is claiming to know that Jesus is the Son of God, and thus, should be able to provide those reasons. So here, what you are objecting to is that Naked_Rectitude is violating a norm of assertion by asserting that Jesus is the Son of God without being able to give good reasons for believing that Jesus is the Son of God.

This also should help dereds and neeeel understand something of the function of your interaction with Naked_Rectitude. You strongly support this norm and so you are not willing to let Naked_Rectitude get away with blatantly disregarding it.

Second, I think we've talked about this before, but we should be cautious about assuming that if someone says that they know that p, that they are claiming to be certain that p. Descartes' definition of knowledge--a belief that is impossible to doubt--is just not how many people understand or use the term. It is very easy to get someone, right after saying that they know that p, to also say that p might be false. Does that mean that they didn't really know that p? If so, our usage of the term is broken (and I would be more inclined to think the philosophical usage broken than the ordinary one). I know there is a stoplight at the corner. Could I be wrong about this? Yes.

In this case, doesnt it all come down to "good" reasons? Who gets to define what a good reason is. Obviously a good reason for N_R is not a good reason for MB. Can we only assert something as true if we all agree that its true?

I don't see how you are getting here from what I said. As tame_deuces likes to point, sometimes the universe will tell you if your reasons for believing something is true are bad by making you fall on your face.

Also, for what is is worth, I think the bolded is false.

As far as the question of why N_R believes in god, N_R has what he believes are good reasons to believe. MB thinks that they arent good reasons.

Yeah, well one of them is wrong.

What explanations has NR offered so far?

Damn, this is why I post on this forum and thanks for the links, I wasn't aware that there are different kinds of certainty. If I had I would certainly have brought that up right at the start. Yes, you're right, I think NR's certainty is Psychological but not Epistemic even if he thinks that it is. (In fact, generally I think that theists work backwards on this issue, they start with psychological certainty, using faith, then in efforts to make their beliefs seem more credible to others, and maybe even to themselves, will contrive epistemic reasons for their certainty. WLC springs to mind.)

I'm trying to examine personal experiences as a reason for holding beliefs, I didn't start talking to NR ITT until he'd said that his personal experiences were why he believes. It's a subject that interests me because it seems to be a very common reason for theists to believe. Since we're learning more all the time about cognitive biases, it seems to me that personal experiences perhaps shouldn't be considered so reliable or be offered as a 'good' reason for believing something that's so important. Do you think that personal experiences are a 'good reason' for believing in god? Or is that not the right question?

Ok, change of tack if you don't mind. Have you looked at the articles that OrP linked? If so, how would you describe your level of certainty on this issue?

For the record, I've never said that being convinced by a mystical state is circular and I've never rejected mystical states either, I thought we were past this? I think this issue of me considering that some of the arguments that you've put forward have been circular is still confusing this issue but I really don't know how to explain it any differently than I've already done several times. At this point I'd rather give up on that and move on. If you do it again, I'll be sure to say so.

Well, if we take William James' thoughts on mystical states truly to heart we should ignore your reasons for holding religious beliefs, since you can't express them. I went through James' lectures on religious experience, and all in all I am reminded of Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" article from the 70s: Explaining experience is not experience. We should also remember however that James' was a pragmatist, so essentially (philosophical pun intended) he doesn't care about reality. For him science should focus on prediction and models, not about telling people how the world truly is to them.

It is very important to remember however that William James was a psychologist in the early 1900s. This was a time when scientific realism and materialism were the dominant positions in science, and in psychology behaviorism was becoming the ruling paradigm. In behaviorism psychologists would only study the person, and inner workings (thoughts/minds etc) would be ignored.

These days scientific realism is very are, behaviorism has been replaced by the cognitive perspective and we can look empirically at the mind in manners which were completely unknown in 1910.

Thank you for the links and the explanation and I suspect you are right with regard to MB's strongly supporting the norm in this instance and N_R being psychologically certain but not epistemically certain seems consistent with his posting here in general. I don't think that Jesus is the Son of God is the assertion that is being contested but I think the point may hold.

It's said on the page you linked that the norm of assertion fits with the intuition that a speaker wants to be considered right and authoritative. What about when the speaker accepts they may be wrong and are not claiming authority? I'm not sure to the extent that N_R has claimed his beliefs constitute knowledge though he will surely act as though his beliefs are. I'm not sure to the extent it is appropriate to hold that a person asserts that they know x when they often explicitly assert they believe x.

This is difficult to answer, I'm not even sure how to do that. What I can say is that I have never claimed, not even once, epistemic certainty. Not even sure why this is on the table, I've explained, ITT and others, that my beliefs may not represent the truth, even if I believe they do.

I can tell you what I know, if that helps. I know that I experience spiritual states. I know that I am compelled to attribute them to Christ.

What I can't know is that the states exist outside of my experience of them, or that they are in fact related to, or are, Christ.

You can call the gap between what I know and what I don't know, faith, I prefer to call the gap reason. That is to say, if I was able to ignore these experiences, or if they were not present, or if they did not inherently (appear to?) claim to be Christ, I would not attribute them to Christ, and thus believe in Christ (as divine).

It goes a little further than this, since like I've said, Christ is Corroborated (Biblically, historically, through others). Which again, gives my experience some credence (to me) over something intangible, or obviously false. If these same experiences claimed to be Santa Clause, I would conclude that I'm delusional. I still may be, but it's not the most obvious conclusion to me, Christ being God and communicating with me is the most obvious to me.

I'm fine with you ignoring my reasons, I don't think you need any qualifiers to do so, especially this one, since there are many things I can't express which you likely don't ignore. I insist that if you accept these mystical states, you should likewise accept them as reasons, otherwise, you do not accept mystical states.

Fair enough.

Completely off topic, but, "What is it like to be a bat?" reminded me of the book "The man who mistook his wife for a hat", maybe cause it rhymes, and because it deals with psychology. You likely came across it at one point in your studies.

Ok, let's carry on with this then. Would you say that you are Psychological certain?

I think you have to be careful here because you're perilously close to engaging in circular logic. The bible can certainly be considered as part of the collection of evidence corroborating that a man called Jesus existed but it can't be evidence of his divinity because that relies on accepting that the bible is divinely inspired by god and you've already agreed that doing that would be begging the question. So, you can't offer the bible to support your belief that Christ is divine, or anything that follows from that, such as that he is active in your life (because if he was just a man, how could he be doing anything other than remaining quite dead). The bible is off the table, it's not a good reason to me, and it shouldn't be to you. No?

You say it gives your experience credence over something 'obviously false' but as I've said above, it can't give credence to your belief that Jesus is divine unless you assume it is divinely inspired and then you're begging the question again. Also, I'm not sure how you can claim a spiritual belief to be something tangible and 'obviously not false' is a bit of a questionable claim to make even by implication.

Lastly, what is and isn't obvious to you is irrelevant in terms of whether or not it's correct or constitutes a good reason. I doubt either of us would accept 'it was obvious to me' as an answer to the question 'how do you know?'.

I don't think you should do this.

The gap that's being discussed is between that which you are psychologically certain of and that which you are epistemically certain of. If your psychological commitment that God exists is greater than your epistemic commitment, this seems consistent with your claim that you aren't epistemically certain, which in turn seems consistent with your posts, then what explains that?

If I'm understanding the page linked above, your epistemic certainty will or should be a result of your evaluating the reasons for and against you holding a belief if your psychological certainty is greater than that then the gap seems better understood in terms of faith.

I think by the usual definitions the gap between what is known epistemically and what is believed (we're saying psychologically but a Christian might say spiritually, or mystically) is faith, and definitely not reason as reason is normally understood.

But I think what N_R means is that in his estimation he is employing a reasoning process to extrapolate from experiences to interpretations thereof. I think what he also means is the process isn't entirely subjective from his point of view. The edifice of his world view wasn't something he constructed entirely on his own. He compares his internal descriptions (which are already not the experiences themselves) to other Christian descriptions, he thinks that his experiences are more coherently described as experiences of Christ than something else, and that involves a thinking process which is like a process of reasoning.

Where I think neeel, and MB, and others (if I'm remembering the thread) object is really at the first step, that moving from experiences in themselves to symbolic or conceptual descriptions of the experiences is not a reasoning or rational process. It is conditioned by ones existing culture and worldview, the prominence of Christianity within that culture, and etc. And this is the step that really does all the heavy lifting as far as concluding that an experience is an experience of Christ, rather than any process of thinking after the fact which tries to make sense of the symbolic interpretation and fit it in with this or that religious worldview.

I think faith fits into that first step as well. We have faith that the symbolic world that we attach to our experiences has a validity despite the fact that we are not entirely in control of, or rationally conscious of, the preconditions that make certain symbols symbols for us, and not others.

When N_R argues for the immediacy of his experience, i.e that he couldn't be honest with himself and deny his experience or even his symbolic understanding of it, he's describing the immediacy of that symbolic world. There is no mediation of reason there. But it's the subjectivity of symbolism, and its given-ness (we don't choose all of the things which precondition our symbolic world) that makes it so that the interpretation lacks the force of rational argument, such that saying that the gap is closed by "reason" isn't really correct

Good post well named.

What seems clear from this is that there's an element of evaluation prior to the experience that is consistent with a Christian worldview. That you would have considered a similar experience involving Santa Claus delusional* suggests an openness to an experience involving Christ that is not afforded Santa. You have also claimed you would have started your journey via the Koran if you felt that was the journey so there seems an openness to spiritual experience extending beyond Christianity specifically.

*It's a claim that interests me. If the experience is as compelling to you as you have suggested in this thread how easy do you think it would be to write the experience off as delusion? I get that the initial whispers may have been easy to dismiss but the experience of a clear directive to accept Christ would be harder to? It seems that if it would be easy to write off the experience can only be so compelling because of a strong predisposition to believe that it is Christ?

You've said the bolded before, and I'm still curious about it. Among philosophy faculty or PhD about 70% say they accept or lean towards some version of scientific realism (from here). I can't find a similar poll of scientists, but would be surprised to find that big a divergence (based on my own interactions with scientists and that I don't think the philosophical community would be that different). Maybe we mean different things by scientific realism? Or this is a cultural thing? Or maybe scientific realism is much less common in the social sciences, which have had much less impact on metaphysical views among philosophers than physics?

I had a philosophy professor in college who described it as being akin to a physiological change. He was a Christian, very familiar with the arguments for and against theism and Christianity (philosophy of religion was an AOS for him), but like many Christian philosophers, he had doubts, and days when he wasn't sure he believed at all. However, after becoming an Anglican and actively practicing mysticism, he had a vision of Jesus (literally!) while fasting and said that ever since (I knew him about about fifteen years later) he found it impossible to doubt the reality of God or the truth in a broad sense of Christianity. He said it was as if his brain changed so that he was not longer physically capable of such doubt. He still knew and taught the arguments against theism, etc., but they held no force for him. He also knew that there were alternative explanations for his experiences, but again, was unable to actually doubt their reality.

I think what Williamson and others would say is that in that case the speakers are not really making an assertion then, or not a full assertion. What is going on here is that they are trying to understand the nature of a particular speech act (assertion) and especially its logical implications.

I had a few conversations with a professor who worked on this topic when I was in graduate school about how this relates to faith claims, and he basically was very skeptical that faith claims should be understood cognitively (as being about a belief in a proposition rather than as a performative or emotivist expression).

Anyway, I suspect that if knowledge is a norm of assertion, it is not universal, but rather specific to certain communities, such as academic ones or maybe some atheistic ones. But of course, that is why there is a disagreement here--people can argue over which norm is better, one that limits assertions to claims with adequate justifications, or one that marks off subject areas where it is okay to assert claims even without adequate evidence to justify believing those claims.

Nailed it, except maybe the very last sentence which I'm not sure about.


I don't understand this, is there another way you could say it?

The bolded seems wrong to me. I think the reasoning would go like this. Performing miracles, making prophetic predictions, and rising from the dead are all unusual abilities, unusual enough that if someone could actually do them then there is good reason to think that person might be special in some way, even divine. The Bible (not understood as divinely inspired, but just as an ordinary book) should increase the likelihood that Jesus could do these things (certainly over a random person), thus, the Bible increases the likelihood that Jesus is divine, making it a form of Bayesian evidence for the divinity of Jesus. This doesn't assume that the Bible is divinely inspired and so doesn't fall prey to the circularity you are worried about.

I am saying that faith is of primary importance to how and why we proceed from the experience to the symbolic understanding of the experience, and I would unpack that in a few ways:

I make symbolism primary instead of concepts because conceptual understanding entails an attempt to make the concept coherent, both in terms of avoiding self-contradiction and fitting within our conceptual framework. But symbolism is more evocative, subjective and polysemic. The understanding of an experience as being an experience "of Christ" does not immediately entail some systematic theology or christology.

Faith also has more than one meaning. So that faith can be related to epistemology, i.e as a response to "how do you know that the symbol Christ which you attach to the experience actually corresponds to the experience?" "By faith". So when you are approaching the nature of N_R's acceptance of the symbolic correspondence, you would label it faith in that sense, but I agree with OrP's professor:

Or see also his story about the professor who had a vision of Jesus and felt that it was as though his very being was changed by it. For N_R, the faith by which the experience is an experience of Christ is not propositional, it is something that acted upon him. I would describe my own experiences in a similar way. To say I believe in Christ and that I experience Christ is not as much to try to describe my epistemic state towards a proposition (which is also why N_R can say he is not certain) as to express or emote that I feel that I have been changed by the experience in a way. It is not only "by faith" that I correlate the experience to the symbol Christ, but I feel as though the experience itself performs within me a change and leads me to an openness towards a mystery that is itself "faith".

The other thing I was trying to incorporate is the rational objection to the validity of equating "the experience" to "the experience of Christ" on the basis that the correspondence is conditioned by things outside of the experience itself, i.e the culture we are raised in, our pre-existing worldview and symbols and mindset and all that. It is the objection that says that you could have had an experience with the same experiential content and ended up a muslim if you lived in a different context.

I think that objection is valid, and I think it's important for religious people to understand it. There is a need for humility about the state of our "knowledge" of and about God, especially in dealing with cultural and religious pluralism. That does not mean however that I don't think there can be any comparison or judgement between religious views as to which might be "better", or more "true", but it clarifies the context in which such judgements can be meaningful and that there are limits to the extent which such experiences can justify a conceptual theology even once you've admitted the validity of the experiences to begin with

I don't get this at all. How can what it says in an ordinary book make it more likely that the person being written about is able to do what the book claims than a random person? Does Uri Gellar's autobiography just because it describes it, make it more likely that he can actually bend spoons with the power of his mind than a random person?

Did you see my earlier reply to you? I'm curious about whether or not you consider personal experiences to be good reasons for theistic beliefs?

Can the statement "I believe in God" be understood as cognitive by virtue of being a proposition regarding the speakers belief? I recall that in the discussion of cognitivism there's a distinction in the non-cognitivists appraisal of the statements "murder is wrong" and "I believe murder is wrong" is the same arguable here?

If Jesus was able to multiply twelve loaves to feed three thousand people, you would think some of those three thousand people would notice and write about it. Thus, finding such writing would at least marginally increase the probability that Jesus did in fact do such a miracle.
I think they can in principle be good epistemic reasons, although I think they generally aren't. I think the concerns with religious experiences discussed by DeRose here are real.