I read some of the discussion on philosophy of religion blogs after the survey came out. One of the noteworthy results of the survey was that philosophers who don’t specialize in philosophy of religion were about 3⁄4 atheists. One or two of the philosophy of religion bloggers claimed that their non-specialist colleagues weren’t familiar with some of the recent literature presenting new arguments for the existence of God. As a philosopher who doesn’t specialize in philosophy of religion, I thought they underestimated how familiar people like me are with the arguments concerning theism. However, I admit for people like me it comes up especially in history, so I followed up on that and looked at some of the recommended recent papers. I was unable to find anything that looked at all compelling, or really even new, but perhaps I didn’t try hard enough.
So, sum total, you’re saying that philosophers of religion believe because they engage in special pleading to get separate epistemic standards for God?
(Please note that my actual current position is strong agnosticism: “God may exist, but if so, He’s plainly hiding, and no God worthy of the name would be incapable of hiding from me, so I cannot know if such a God exists or not.”)
Well, I didn’t want to go into detail, because I don’t remember all the details and didn’t feel like wasting time going and looking it up again, but yes, essentially. The usual form is “if you make these seemingly reasonable assumptions, you get to God, so God!”, and usually the assumptions actually didn’t look that reasonable to me to begin with, and of course an alternative response to the arguments is always that they provide evidence that the assumptions are much more powerful than they seem and so need much closer examination.
I’ve got a variant of that. “Assuming God exists, He seems to be going to some trouble to hide. Either He doesn’t want to be found, in which case the polite thing is to respect that, or He’s doing some screwy reverse-psychology thing, in which case I have better things to do with my time than engage an omnipotent troll.”
I read some of the discussion on philosophy of religion blogs after the survey came out. One of the noteworthy results of the survey was that philosophers who don’t specialize in philosophy of religion were about 3⁄4 atheists. One or two of the philosophy of religion bloggers claimed that their non-specialist colleagues weren’t familiar with some of the recent literature presenting new arguments for the existence of God. As a philosopher who doesn’t specialize in philosophy of religion, I thought they underestimated how familiar people like me are with the arguments concerning theism. However, I admit for people like me it comes up especially in history, so I followed up on that and looked at some of the recommended recent papers. I was unable to find anything that looked at all compelling, or really even new, but perhaps I didn’t try hard enough.
So, sum total, you’re saying that philosophers of religion believe because they engage in special pleading to get separate epistemic standards for God?
(Please note that my actual current position is strong agnosticism: “God may exist, but if so, He’s plainly hiding, and no God worthy of the name would be incapable of hiding from me, so I cannot know if such a God exists or not.”)
Well, I didn’t want to go into detail, because I don’t remember all the details and didn’t feel like wasting time going and looking it up again, but yes, essentially. The usual form is “if you make these seemingly reasonable assumptions, you get to God, so God!”, and usually the assumptions actually didn’t look that reasonable to me to begin with, and of course an alternative response to the arguments is always that they provide evidence that the assumptions are much more powerful than they seem and so need much closer examination.
I’ve got a variant of that. “Assuming God exists, He seems to be going to some trouble to hide. Either He doesn’t want to be found, in which case the polite thing is to respect that, or He’s doing some screwy reverse-psychology thing, in which case I have better things to do with my time than engage an omnipotent troll.”