Dr. Craig On Religious Pluralism: His Response Misses The Point
Vložit
- čas přidán 22. 10. 2023
- I'm joined by Dr. Tomas Bogardus, a professor of philosophy at Pepperdine University. We discuss Dr. Craig's animated video linked below.
• How Can Jesus Be the O...
Link to Dr. Bogardus's paper on the topic of the video:
philpapers.org/archive/BOGTPO...
----------------------------------------------GIVING-----------------------------------------------
One Time:
You can leave a Super Thanks or give on PayPal
www.paypal.com/paypalme/thean...
Monthly:
To become a patron, go to / theanalyticchristian
-----------------------------------------MERCHANDISE----------------------------------------
To purchase TAC shirts, mugs, phone cases, and more, go to
www.theanalyticchristian.com
---------------------------------------------CONTACT-----------------------------------------------
If my videos have been of service to you, I'd love to hear how you have benefitted from them. You can reach me at
theanalyticchristian@gmail.com
---------------------------------------------WEBSITE--------------------------------------------------
www.theanalyticchristian.com - Zábava
Want to see more theists evaluate Dr. Craig's arguments? *Click here to see the full playlist* ! czcams.com/play/PLlVH-ThCazKlbDFfL0yH4bLe2bT2jzov-.html
I love Dr. Craig's work and I love this series! It may be interesting to try to fairly summarize each and have Dr. Craig back on in the future to hear his response to any objections or clarifications people made, regardless of who made the comments.
Great work! You two show a lot of TACt and have some great comedy and chemistry mixed in with informative work on a challenging topic. I love this series!
Great video! Tomas is spot on.
I was hoping for some arguments in favour of religious exclusivism. I accepted all the logic given in this episode and still reject Christian exclusivism.
It was an interesting logical presentation though.
I think Craig's video was critiquing more popular level objections rather than those proffered by professional philosophers (which would be unsurprising considering the target audience). So I'm not sure the straw man allegation is quite accurate.
It's been a while since you released a video. Do you think that you will ever release a new video?
I understand your point. But, in defense of the straw man allegation consider this.
Craig brings up John Hick (a professional philosopher) who argued for religious pluralism. And Hick is brought up in the video as an example of someone holding a more nuanced view than the common pop level view that all religions teach basically the same thing. If Craig was willing to make the viewer aware of an academic philosopher defending a more robust version of religious pluralism that is not the pop level view, it seems he could have done the same when it comes to Hick’s actual argument. Instead it seems we got a straw man version of Hick’s argument.
@@TheAnalyticChristian I mentioned this in my other comment to you, but the IEP and the SEP seem to agree with Craig's brief citation of Hick. (See the IEP article on religious diversity and the SEP article on religious pluralism). I don't have access to the sources they cite, but it seems unlikely to me that these peer-reviewed sources are straw-manning Hick. It's more likely that it's a plausible reading of him. FWIW, it certainly matches the impression I got when I read Hick in grad school. He seemed to be arguing that the central claims of the major religions were equally false - not just that they were unjustified (although he was of course also arguing that they were unjustified).
@@computationaltheist7267
_It's been a while since you released a video. Do you think that you will ever release a new video?_
Will I _ever_ release a new video? Yes. 😉
I was actually working on editing my next video last weekend, but (1) grad school keeps me busy (I don't know how Joe Schmid does it); (2) evidently I'm not that time efficient when it comes to editing. 😜
It was interesting to watch Koons' recent discussion with a Lutheran (Jordan B Cooper)
Another excellent video. Dr Bogardus's extension and breakdown of the various flavors of pluralism was extremely clear and helpful.
It doesn't actually seem like he disagreed with any of the central arguments of Dr Craig's video. While the 5-minute video is obviously nowhere is near as nuanced as this hour-long discussion, He thinks Dr Craig's responses work to refute the various versions of pluralism including the "steel-man" versions he discusses.
Really good video. I once again find the content of the video to not be accurately represented by the thumbnail/title. I went into this one expecting the conversation to have gone a very different direction.
Regardless, it's great content. Thanks for putting it out. I am excited to hear that you're going to get Craig in to comment on the series. Assuming you give him a substantial amount of time, that could make for a very nice series of critiques and responses.
Thanks for watching and leaving a comment! Sorry to hear you found my title and thumbnail misleading. I thought it was accurate while also sparking curiosity in the viewer making it more likely to get a click.
I say it’s accurate because Bogardus implies several times that the weakest form of the argument targets the TRUTH of the belief in particularism. Setting up the weakest form of an argument and knocking it down and failing to mention better versions, or at least that there are better versions is a straw man. This is why Bogardus felt the need to steel man the argument. Acting as though the best versions of the pluralist argument targets the TRUTH of particularism rather that RATIONALITY of belief in particularism misses a very substantive point. That’s why I gave it the title and thumbnail that I did.
Thoughts?
@@TheAnalyticChristian Well, I don't want to get into a long critique of a video that I actually liked quite a bit, but I am a sucker for internet arguments so here goes:
"Setting up the weakest form of an argument and knocking it down is a straw man."
I don't think that's what a "straw man" is. A straw man involves making a caricature of an argument. I.E., Rather than attack what someone ACTUALLY says, you create your own version of the argument that's easier to knock down than the actual one. A Straw Man is not when there is a family of arguments that people actually make, and you pick the most basic one (and common one, IMO) and refute it.
It can be quite valid to focus on a weaker form of an argument, especially if that weaker form will be the most common or influential one in everyday conversations with unbelievers. That's not a strawman, it's just focusing your attention on the most common argument.
Craig's arguments would be strawmen if they weren't arguments that any serious person made. But obviously, such arguments (including the weakest versions mentioned in Craig's video) are wildly common in pop culture. And the SEP and IEP articles on religious pluralism and religious diversity respectively seem to affirm that John Hick's religious pluralism could "roughly be summarized" as the view that all religions are equally false in their central claims (IEP) AND that he viewed exclusivism as "arrogant" (SEP). I don't have the sources they cite to check whether they cited him accurately, but it seems implausible that both of these peer-reviewed secular resources would independently adopt strawmen of John Hick's positions if such readings were not a plausible interpretation of his position.
At the risk of being repetitive from our previous interactions: These videos are not aimed at professional philosophers to help them better understand how to interact with other professional philosophers. The videos are very short summaries of issues aimed at lay audiences to help them have conversations with their friends, neighbors, families, and so on. So to criticize it harshly for not covering a bunch of nuanced arguments discussed in philosophical journals is just missing the purpose of the videos.
I do want to reiterate that I think these videos you are doing are extremely useful. Your guests are diving deeper, digging out important nuances, adding helpful perspectives, etc. That's awesome. But the adversarial framing of these videos does feel pretty odd when the guest ends up largely agreeing with the video's central arguments and focuses on adding further nuance where he/she thinks it appropriate.
Watching from the Philippines bro
One difference I've had with some of my fellow atheists is that they have a tendency to dismiss all religions as *equally* false, just as Craig's video claimed. This can't be correct however, because for all religions to be equally false, they would all need to be making exactly the same truth claims, and if they were doing that, then they would all be the same religion, not different religions. But since they do make different truth claims, we can compare these claims and determine that some religions are less likely to be true than others. For instance, Sam Harris once quipped that 'Mormonism is just Christianity with a few additional beliefs attached'. The point he was making is that in order for Mormonism to be true, not only would all the truth claims of Christiantity need to be true, but also the few additional things only Mormons believe. The more truth claims there are, the greater the likelihood that one of them will be false, so one could conclude that Christianity is therefore more likely to be true than Mormonism. Also to be considered is the nature of the truth claims themselves. Even if religions A and B required believing the same number of core tenets, but that the core tenets of religion B were more problematic than those of religion A, then we could conclude that the probability of religion A being true is greater than the probability of religion B being true.
How is Plantinga's answer to the 'could have been born somewhere else' argument apply to the question of justification of religious belief?
It seems to me that of course if you had been born in Michegan and not California, you would have beliefs that correspond to your different birthplace. But in both scenarios, you have a true belief based on the same standard of empirical evidence - ie your birth certificate in both cases would correspond with your birth place. This is entirely different to the question of which religion is true and why circumstances of birth will alter beliefs about religion.
It's a huge category error to conflate a trivial empirically testable belief with a religious belief.
This seems like a typical example of apologist question begging the reliability of the evidence for God. Maybe that explains why Plantinga was so obsessed with the EAAN and why he so badly misunderstood the two paradigms - undercutting the weight of one while overconfidently trusting the other.
Hmm, at first thought Dr. Bogardus account of knowledge sounds to me a lot like Kripke’s causal-historical account of names. I wonder how strong that connection really is…
Not sure, but I do know that the Kripke account comes up in Bogardus’s work on the question, “Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?”
@@TheAnalyticChristian Thanks, I’ll check that out.
It was a great interview. I wonder if Dr. Bogardus's latest formulation of the argument doesn't succumb to Plantinga's religious epistemology. An approximate formulation of the argument that he (Dr. Bogardus) provides would go something like this:
(1) A belief is justified if and only if the cognitive faculties in question (those used to form beliefs) aim at producing true beliefs.
(2) The cognitive faculties used to form religious beliefs do not aim at producing true beliefs.
(3) Therefore, religious beliefs are unjustified.
Plantinga correctly points out (in my opinion) that (2) is true only if Christianity is false. If Christianity is true, a child born into a Christian family is not merely agreeing with their parents, but rather their cognitive faculties are functioning as they should.
That's an interesting point. Deploying sensis divinitatus to defeat the religious indoctrination might work. It's not clear we can know that children are arriving at their beliefs using the sensis divinitatus path or otherwise. However, maybe we don't even need sensis divinitatus. Is it not he case that children are rational to believe their parents absent defeaters? The final form of the argument is not targeting truth, but only rationality. It seems that it's not going to work on children regardless.
Maybe your point is that as adults, we can look back to our childhood and claim, "no, no, I wasn't indoctrinated, I was using my sensis divinitatus." In that case, is our introspection accurately describing what was really happening?
@@wilkielai Thank you for your response.
You mentioned, “It is not clear whether we can know if children are arriving at their beliefs using the sensus divinitatis pathway or otherwise.” This is where we need to ask an important question: what exactly is the sensus divinitatis? Plantinga seems to argue that the sensus divinitatis is that component which forms and supports theistic beliefs. For example, if your sensus divinitatis is functioning properly, you will form * beliefs * like 'God loves me' or 'Jesus died on the cross for me.'
However, I believe that Plantinga's model, while effective in defeating the supposed defeater, could also work in a much weaker version of the sensus divinitatis, namely that the sensus divinitatis does not produce * beliefs * but * appearances *. That is, if my sensus divinitatis is working, I do not form the belief 'God loves me' or 'Jesus died on the cross for me' but rather the appearance of 'God loves me' or 'Jesus died on the cross for me'.
Here's why this is important: your views are most likely influenced by your context, and if someone leans more towards a kind of skepticism, this can lead to doubt. However, appearances are much more difficult, I think, to be contaminated by this kind of skepticism. So when you ask, “Is this what is happening?” if we use appearances, it seems like it is.
I'm not a philosopher by training, but i just enjoy thinking about this stuff. I think I agree with you that direct experiences are less prone to the skepticism worry. My point was more like it is hard for me to know whether my reason for a certain belief is ultimately derived from direct experience (primarily) or by social influences when both are present. It might be the case that I have a minor religious experience (say I sense God directly), but because my friends and family are religious, I'm more likely to interpret it as such. So I don't know if I'm as confident to attribute my belief to the direct experience or to socialization. It seems like if I was indoctrinated, I still have to worry about my direct experiences, because there is a interpretative step there.
@@wilkielai
Thank you for your response. I think it depends on the type of experience we're talking about. For example, suppose you're in a religious gathering, and suddenly you have the appearance that Jesus died for you. I don't see how the environment could influence your interpretation of the appearance, but it could influence the appearance itself. For instance, it's unlikely someone would have the appearance 'Jesus died for me' in a synagogue.
Still, I don't think this undermines the sensus divinitatis. If we adopt the view that it functions like any other faculty or relies on other faculties to function, then we should expect this behavior.
I think what Plantinga could argue is that just as an alcoholic drink affects certain faculties, your context also affects your faculties in certain ways. For example, if our cognitive faculties were formed to produce beliefs about the truth of Christianity, it's not surprising that when we are in a church or a Christian context, these faculties would work better than when we are in a synagogue.
Guess whose show Dr. Craig will never accept an invitation to be on again.
Why not? I plan to invite Dr. Craig on at the end of this series to respond.
This is how philosophy is done 🤷♂️ In my opinion, to criticize another’s ideas in this way is in fact a sign of respect, and I’m sure Dr. Craig will see it that way as well.
I am toying with the idea that all supernatural based religions require logical fallacies if one wants to try to convince others they are true. Aren't supernatural claims in and of themselves, logical fallacies when claimed to be true?
No. Why think that?
@@TheAnalyticChristian Because they are faith based claims requiring, non-demonstrable, supernatural agency.
It's not a logical fallacy to have faith in it. It is a logical fallacy to tell me it is true. It is a claim which cannot be substantiated.
It seems to fit the category in my way of thinking. It is invoking a faith belief that cannot be questioned. Is that logical?
@@danielpaulson8838 You're talking to the guy who runs a CZcams channel that is devoted to presenting philosophical and scientific arguments for God's existence and Christianity in particular. He has a whole playlist of videos on these. You should check these out!
@@danielpaulson8838But what formal error in reasoning do you think has occurred?
@@dakotadalton85 You know you guys share the same tactics as theists?
Bring something to the table if you want to talk. Denial isn't going to fly in the world of thinkers. Get there.