On Belief in God X

[FallentoReason]

FULL STOP


*bzzzzt* I haven't once said anyone else *but* the person with the experiential justification should be believing event x/belief y.

You missed the caveat I issued down the line - IF there are no valid objections or alternate explanations.

Are you saying if there's no valid objections or alternate explanations, then you still have no reason to believe them? I'm confused...

Either way, we're not talking about anyone else's beliefs but the theist in question.

That's another problem with theistic beliefs - they are often not internally consistent.

True, but we're keeping it simple in this thread. You see a royal flush, you can claim you have a royal flush. Nothing more, nothing less.

Let's leave the demons out of these. We both know that there are a myriad of ways in which what you consider a properly basic belief could be false without invoking them.

This is something you haven't acknowledged so far - that atheist does have many reasons to be skeptical about the theist's claims and he shares those reasons. If I am the one holding the royal flush, the other guy is not simply telling me to check and recheck. The first reason he gives me is that he happens to be holding a royal four-of-a-kind. That alone is reason enough for me to atleast look at my cards again. As it happens, he is also willing to show me his hand. Which means, I am not being asked to check and recheck my cards without any reason, but that I am being given sufficient reasons to doubt my experience.

And why should the person with the experiential justification for their claim even listen to your suggestions? Sure, any given properly basic belief might have been formed in such a way that it doesn't actually reflect the truth about the subject in question, but when we're talking about a past event, we can't exactly go about it like you outlined allegorically. All the theist can really do is claim p i.e. what they perceived to experience. Suggestions that presuppose ~p and therefore bluntly conclude that they're e.g, deluded, don't really do much. As the theist, I'd just shrug my shoulders and say "so what? I know what I experienced". You casting a bit of agnosticism over a past event isn't a strong argument at all.

Granting that would depend on their claim. For example, while I may grant the experience of having a royal flush as being internally consistent, the same wouldn't stand for the claim of having five of a kind. Theistic claims often fall in the latter category. They are sufficiently contradictory to reality for a person (whether it be the theist or anyone else) to question the experience on that basis alone.

Sounds like you know the totality of what we call "reality". Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence my friend

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They can say whatever they want about the cards they see in front of them. The way properly basic beliefs function almost always guarantee that they are being internally consistent with their claims. Whether or not the internal is consistent with the *ex*ternal is a different matter, and one that you can tackle by undermining their concept of a super-duper-extra royal megaflush. If it's contradictory like a square circle, then their experiential justification is invalid since the experience was false to begin with, just like someone who claims to have seen a square circle holds a false belief.

What I'm trying to say, and what I often say to theists when this subject comes up, is that internal beliefs (should) mean nothing by themselves. Any belief I hold is not a based upon anything I can reliably trust until it has undergone, and survived, the far more rigorous stress test that is testing it external to myself; sharing it with others and allowing them to test it. I am a human. I have senses which are prone to reporting false or contradictory information and I do not have anything like a perfect understanding of what they do show me to know, every time, what is legitimate and what is not all by myself.

If I hold a hand which looks to me, at first glance, like a super-duper-extra royal megaflush, it would be dishonest of me to actually believe it is such a thing until I lay the cards down and subject my hand to the scrutiny of both the rules of the game and the other players at the table. I may really want it to be the ultimate hand of poker, because I am playing this game and I want to win it, but if I am to be a player of this game, I can't let my desire to win be more important than following the rules. Otherwise, I am not really sitting at this table to play the game honestly. I'm only sitting here so that I can make believe that I'm special and feel the entirely insipid satisfaction of knowing that nobody else can ever prove that my hand isn't better than all of theirs.

In short, internal beliefs (other than those which form the border between myself and full-on solipsism) don't mean jack shit to me, and that does not except any that I actually might hold.

Jeez... you must have a pretty hard time getting through your average day. Do you confirm with the bus driver every time you get on that the route number the bus is displaying is accurate? Do you then confirm with the people within earshot that the bus driver did indeed say yes/no? I'm having a hard time believing you question every single internal belief (i.e. properly basic beliefs, as I don't see any other way for an internal belief to form, apart from a priori beliefs but they don't apply to your science-based p.o.v. above) you hold.

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Recently I've realised that it's not correct to counter someone's belief in god x by pointing to n number of historically possible gods and deducing that x/n is low. This is incorrect if, and only if, the believer has experiential justification for their belief.

This thought is exactly the same as if we were all playing poker and we were dealt 5 cards. Someone could look at their hand and say "I've got a royal flush!" and then someone could counter by saying "it's unlikely because the probability of that happening is 1/x". Well, the *fact* is that they have got a properly basic belief that they have a royal flush (i.e. their belief has come directly via the senses). Therefore, they are justified in believing they have a royal flush even if the odds are 1/(10^99).

This is where the believer is positioned. Whether their senses *actually* gave them a true encounter is another matter, but my point is (I guess) that saying the truth of their belief is statistically unlikely is meaningless to someone with a justified belief (of some degree), hence why the two parties just slip right past each other without really engaging in a proper discussion.

Eager to see what the atheist response would be to this...

The analogy is flawed. The flaw is that the believer believes in the straight flush without having seen the hand. There is no evidence that his particular religion is the right one. None.

I'm not sure how you know what they've seen or haven't seen. On that note, they have the right to believe their religion is right *only* if they have experiential justification.