First post :-)

I had 2 primary objections to Dr. Scharp's arguments...

1. Weak Theism, Belief and Epistemology

I don't think that Dr. Scharp's position on epistemology amounts to a meaningful critique of Craig's apologetic, even if we take at face value his numbers (which he selected for the purpose of discussion and not specifically to defend).

Let's presume weak-belief/knowledge is in the 51%-80% range and 81%+ range would be strong-belief/knowledge.

Craig's case, as he describes many times is a "cumulative case". Let's imagine a different scenario, where a person is investigating a crime scene. In the crime scene we find 5 pieces of evidence. The first is a fingerprint, but it is only a 60% partial print. The second is a hat, but it is missing 40% of it. The third is camera footage, but the right 1/3 is blurred out, revealing only 67% of the assailant's face. The fourth is a mole on the assailant's arm, but only 53% of it is viewable. And finally, the fifth is a footprint, but only 57% of it remains. Suspect A matches all of these, being seen in pictures with a hat in the past resembling the portion they found, having a footprint consistent with the portion they found, so on and so forth.

All of these, under Dr. Scharp's assessment, would be "weak beliefs" (which I think is correct), but would it not be right of us to think that 5 weak beliefs might combine in a cumulative case to fairly strong belief that Suspect A is the culprit? As long as the evidence is independent of one another, this seems intuitively right. 

I think this is because we make a big mistake when we think of the probabilities behind belief in something like the LCA. A 30% confidence in the LCA is a 30% confidence that it shows God exists, not a 70% confidence God does not exist. To that effect, we should actually consider any confidence in the arguments to be points, so to speak, on a scoreboard which keeps the balance between reasons for God's existence and reasons against God's existence. On one side of the board we might put the Problem of Evil, or the Coherence of God. On the other side we might put the Cosmological Arguments or the Moral Arguments. It is this balance to which we ultimately apply the 50-80, 80-100 epistemic measures which Dr. Scharp proposes. I think it is perfectly reasonable to make those measurements at that juncture, but not before. 

Thus, Craig's cumulative case, even if each individual argument only supports weak theism, could combine to produce a strong-theistic belief.

2. Divine Psychology Argument

This one, I think, is just bizarre. It looks something like this. Let's return to a crime scene analogy.

1. Agent X is accused of performing an particular act.
2. Evidence Y1 shows no one else could perform the act than Agent X.
3. Evidence Y2 shows that performing this act unintentionally is nearly impossible
4. Evidence Y3 shows the act did not have to happen.
5. Agent X died after the act, and there are no previous records about him
6. We don't know Agent X's psychology
7. We don't know the probability he would do it based on his psychology.
8. We can't conclude Agent X intended to perform the Act

This seems to be obviously false. Let's take, for example, the argument from Fine Tuning. Let's grant both Craig and Scharp their initial premises. Craig says that chance and necessity are ruled out, and the odds are huge (something to the magnitude of 1/10^10^100). Scharp says that we have no idea of the probability that God would want to create a universe. Does it follow then that we must drop the argument altogether? 

Of course not. Just like the example above, we don't need to know the psychology to demonstrate that it is highly plausible that the agent is responsible for the act. We might "fill in the blank" so to speak with an even probability, or we might ignore it because we don't know it, or maybe we would give a "benefit-of-the-doubt" so to speak and set it at reasonably improbable, but we wouldn't put it in as 0% and call it a day. Such a position would be an extreme skepticism that would call into doubt any argument regarding agent responsibility. If a gunman died at the scenes and didn't leave an explanation for his or her attack, would we simply have to withhold judgement as to guilt because we don't know his/her psychology? Even if we have video evidence which is nearly 100% certain?

I think these are the 2 biggest holes in Dr. Scharp's presentation. I would love to hear his thoughts.

 

Last edited by rjonesx (4/14/2016 9:35 am)

@KevinScharp FWIW, I didn't mind those attacks. Craig values consistency very much in his philosophical/theological positions (as do I). If Dr. Scharp could show inconsistencies, he could press Craig on what makes it applicable in one place and not in another. All's fair in love, war and debate :-)

Last edited by rjonesx (4/14/2016 12:39 pm)

I don't understand how Prof Scharp can simultaneously maintain a sort of scientific closure- 'walking on water isn't in accords with our theory so it couldn't have occurred' -and simultaneously maintain an anti-reductivist stance 'science is not adequate for explaining all aspects of experience.' You can't be Hume/Ayer and Rorty at once.

rjonesx wrote:

First post :-)
1. Weak Theism, Belief and Epistemology

I don't think that Dr. Scharp's position on epistemology amounts to a meaningful critique of Craig's apologetic, even if we take at face value his numbers (which he selected for the purpose of discussion and not specifically to defend).

Let's presume weak-belief/knowledge is in the 51%-80% range and 81%+ range would be strong-belief/knowledge.

Craig's case, as he describes many times is a "cumulative case". Let's imagine a different scenario, where a person is investigating a crime scene. In the crime scene we find 5 pieces of evidence. The first is a fingerprint, but it is only a 60% partial print. The second is a hat, but it is missing 40% of it. The third is camera footage, but the right 1/3 is blurred out, revealing only 67% of the assailant's face. The fourth is a mole on the assailant's arm, but only 53% of it is viewable. And finally, the fifth is a footprint, but only 57% of it remains. Suspect A matches all of these, being seen in pictures with a hat in the past resembling the portion they found, having a footprint consistent with the portion they found, so on and so forth.

All of these, under Dr. Scharp's assessment, would be "weak beliefs" (which I think is correct), but would it not be right of us to think that 5 weak beliefs might combine in a cumulative case to fairly strong belief that Suspect A is the culprit? As long as the evidence is independent of one another, this seems intuitively right. 

I think this is because we make a big mistake when we think of the probabilities behind belief in something like the LCA. A 30% confidence in the LCA is a 30% confidence that it shows God exists, not a 70% confidence God does not exist. To that effect, we should actually consider any confidence in the arguments to be points, so to speak, on a scoreboard which keeps the balance between reasons for God's existence and reasons against God's existence. On one side of the board we might put the Problem of Evil, or the Coherence of God. On the other side we might put the Cosmological Arguments or the Moral Arguments. It is this balance to which we ultimately apply the 50-80, 80-100 epistemic measures which Dr. Scharp proposes. I think it is perfectly reasonable to make those measurements at that juncture, but not before. 

Thus, Craig's cumulative case, even if each individual argument only supports weak theism, could combine to produce a strong-theistic belief.
 

I made basically the same point that earlier in the forum; assuming that each argument is founded on independent grounds, and each has at least a confidence of 51%, then, cumulatively, our confidence that at least one argument works is about 98.6%.

You can calculate this by finding the probability of its logical negation, and then subtracting that from 100%. Now we want to calculate the probability that 'at least one of the arguments is correct', which is the logical negation of 'all of the arguments are incorrect'. To calculate the probability that all of the arguments are incorrect, we take the negation of our confidence in each them, .49 in this case, and multiply it with itself for each argument we have, which is six. Hence, our confidence is equal to (1 - (.49)^6), or about 98.6%, well above the 80% threshold.

The caveat here of course is that each of the arguments needs to have an independent probability to each other, which I think is at least a plausible idea; they don't share any premises, and the justification for each of these premises seems independent enough as well.

None of our scientific theories make reference to the activity to God, who is not an item in the natural universe, thus they cannot possibly be said to have any bearing on the exercise of his powers. Prof Scharp seems to have confused physics with theology. Nor either is this the objection that there are hidden ceteris paribus clauses in science, which Scharp attempted to parry before Craig could lodge it, but merely the claim that obviously on any normal conception of him, God is outside the realm of the natural sciences, and thus cannot be limited by any predictive constraints on the activity of nature.