Reply to Reality Check and Satyr:
To Reality Check (and to Satyr by proxy):
I must say that I am impressed.
Thank you (Reality Check)–you have laid out atheistic rationality in a careful, educated (and educating), and concise manner free of ad hominem and insult.
I’m actually going to save your post, as I think you have reductively explained atheistic reasoning (the reason for not believing in God, or holding that belief in God is irrational) in the proverbial nutshell.
In fact, your post performs the simple job of explaining everything that Satyr has been stating all along (despite the fact that Satyr explains atheistic rationality while simultaneously covering his explanation with a thick and gooey helping of crude sarcasm—oh well, it’s his right).
Thus you have effectively explained the reason for atheistic reluctance to buy the “snake oil” offered by the theist in one simple, powerful sentence:
“Evidence and only evidence can give a proposition that purports to describe events in our world a probability of being true, and unless a proposition has some epistemic probability of being true, the proposition cannot be rationally believed to be true.”
Once again, thanks. I think to a certain extent “we” (theists) needed that.
However, a simple criticism follows:
How does “evidence” give objective (beyond the VR) probability of being true? Are you saying that “evidence and only evidence” (anything appearing within the VR that is human experience) automatically possesses the inscrutable power to reveal objective probability as well as epistemic probability?
If this is so, then what of the consciousness of other people? What of a mind-independent physical reality beyond all subjective perception? These are epistemically improbable, due to the fact that these two things are forever beyond the capacity of human perception to access their existence. Do these now become objectively improbable due to the fact that there exists no evidence within the VR that these exist?
I think that “evidence and only evidence” can give (a proposition that describes events in our world) only the epistemic(“in the head”) probability of being true (in the sense that it grants a human being the psychological and intellectual sense that something is “probable”, due to the fact that that which is epistemically probable is that which is experienced (or that which is inferred from experience, such as the microphysical)–yet it cannot grant a reliable or rational sense of “what is probable” beyond the VR.
You stated “…unless a proposition has some epistemic probability of being true, the proposition cannot be rationally believed to be true.”
I take this to mean that there is no sense in believing in the truth of a proposition if it is epistemically improbable.
Yet doesn’t this criticism of irrationality apply to a belief in a mind-independent external reality, or a belief in the existence of other people’s consciousnessesl?
Of course, one might defend belief in the above by stating that “rationality” for belief in physical (non-subjective) reality and other people’s consciousness arises due to the fact that these are rooted or derived from the empirical, yet an opponent can argue that these are only believed derived from the empirical.
I think that in the final analysis, those who put forward propositions purporting to describe events within our world (that happen to fail epistemic probability) create such propositions (aside from the motivation of fear, brainwashing, psychological or emotional prejudices, and so on) due to belief and confidence that despite their epistemic improbability, the relevant propositions are nevertheless objectively probable beyond epistemic improbability, even if this finall “probability” is beyond human knowledge.
Thus there might arise another “rational” belief in the epistemically improbable—a “faith” in an objective probability that (might) belie the epistemic.
Just a thought,
Jay M. Brewer
superchristianity.com
