In his famous essay "The Ethics of Belief," William K. Clifford claimed "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." ). One might claim that a corollary to Clifford's Law is that it is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to withhold belief when faced with sufficient evidence. Seeming to operate on this principle, many religious philosophers—from St. Anselm to Alvin Plantinga—have claimed that non-believers are psychologically or cognitively deficient if they refuse to believe (...) in the existence of God, when presented with evidence for His existence in the form of relevant experience or religious arguments that are prima facie unassailable. Similarly, many atheists fail to see how believers can confront the problem of evil and still assert their belief in a benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient Creator. In this paper, I propose to explain why religious arguments so often fail to persuade . In doing so, I first offer an account of persuasion and then apply it to religious arguments. I go on to argue that at least some religious arguments commit a form of question-begging, which I call "begging the doxastic question." An argument begs the doxastic question, on my account, when a subject would find the argument persuasive only if she antecedently believes the argument's conclusion. This form of question begging is not, strictly speaking, a case of circularity and thus, is not a fallacy; rather, it would explain why one coming to the argument would fail to be persuaded by it unless he already accepted its conclusion. This has the effect, when applied to religious argumentation, that religious arguments are rarely persuasive, which raises the further question: what good are religious arguments? I end by suggesting some non-persuasive functions of religious argument. Finally, I suggest that a full understanding of religious argumentation should give evidentialists pause, for religious beliefs look less like belief states that are sensitive to evidentiary states and more like framework principles or fundamental commitments. (shrink)

Many philosophers and theologians try to add credibility to Christian faith by means of philosophical arguments and explanations. There are two main ways to pursue this aim, and one way is arguably more defensible than the other, at least from the perspective of the apostle Paul. Philosophers and theologians who hold that Paul has a contribution to make in this area should consider the relative efficacy of these two ways. The key area of contrast lies in the epistemic basis of (...) relevant philosophical arguments and explanations: either a basis in the power of direct divine self-manifestation or a basis just in philosophical claims. The latter basis will neglect or obscure the power distinctive of the Christian God and thus miss out on foundational evidence characteristic of that God. This article clarifies what that power is, in terms of responsive divine self-manifestation as God’s self-witness to divine reality and goodness in receptive human moral experience and character formation. The article explains how such power, being interactive toward divine righteousness, serves as a significant alternative to such prominent philosophical overlays on Christian faith as Platonism, Thomism, and Kantianism. The latter overlays improperly depersonalize key evidence for God’s reality and goodness. (shrink)

Most streams of Christianity have emphasized the unknowability of God, but they have also asserted that Christ is the criterion through whom we may have limited access to the depths of God, and through whose life and death we can formulate the doctrine of God as Triune. This standpoint, however, leads to certain complications regarding ‘translating’ the Christian message to adherents of other religious traditions, and in particular the question, ‘Why do you accept Christ as the criterion?’, is one that (...) Christian thinkers have attempted to answer in different ways. There are two influential responses to this query in recent Christian thought: an ‘evidentialist’ approach which gradually moves from a theistic metaphysics to a Christ-centred soteriology, and an ‘unapologetic’ standpoint which takes God's self-disclosure in Christ as the perspectival lens through which to view the world. The opposition between these two groups is primarily over the status of ‘natural theology’, that is, whether we may speak of a ‘natural’ reason, which human beings possess even outside the circle of the Christian revelation, and through which they may arrive at some minimalist understanding of the divine reality. I outline the status of ‘natural theology’ in these strands of contemporary Christian thought, from Barthian ‘Christomonism’ to post-liberal theology to Reformed epistemology, and suggest certain problems within these standpoints which indicate the need for an appropriately qualified ‘natural theology’. Most of the criticisms leveled against ‘natural theology’, whether from secular philosophers or from Christian theologians themselves, can be put in two groups: first, the arguments for God's existence are logically flawed, and, second, even if they succeed they do not point to the Triune God that Christians worship. In contrast to such an old-fashioned ‘natural theology’ which allegedly starts from premises self-evidently true for all rational agents and leads through an inexorable logic to God, the qualified version is an attempt to spell out the doctrinal beliefs of Christianity such as the existence of a personal God who interacts with human beings in different ways, and outline the reasons offered in defence of such statements. In other words, without denying that Christian doctrines operate at one level as the grammatical rules which structure the Christian discourse, such a natural theology insists on the importance of the question of whether these utterances are true, in the sense that they refer to an objective reality which is independent of the Christian life-world. Such a ‘natural theology’, as the discussion will emphasize, is not an optional extra but follows in fact from the internal logic of the Christian position on the universality of God's salvific reach. (shrink)