Response to a Comment (edited)

There was a comment to my latest post and as I started to respond I noticed that it should merit a separate post. My thanks to the commenter. Here's what they wrote:

Gangadean cares about G-knowability because his apologetic goal is to demonstrate God's existence in a way that is consistent with Historic Christianity and Romans 1:19-20. Without "clarity" Romans 1 fails to be true, and the eternal punishment for unbelief is unjustified. The basic things being known in the E-knowable sense doesn't meet this burden of proof. 

Does it follow that if basic things are E-knowable, they are not transcendentally necessary? Why think that if reason "as the laws of thought" is E-knowable, it cannot also be G-knowable? Wouldn't everything that is G-knowable also be justified according to lower evidential standards as well?

My response:

As the other responder noted below, there's debate about just what counts as "historic Christianity" in the relevant sense--just as there is room for debate about what the text you cited says. In other words, the Gangadeanian needs to argue for, rather than presuppose, that their notion of historic Christianity and their reading of Romans 1:20 is the correct one. 

Here's another way to make the same point with a bit more detail. The word 'clarity' and its cognates (e.g., clear) are context sensitive terms. That is to say, what the term means differs depending on facts about the context of utterance. Linguistic evidence of this comes in various forms, but here's one bit. Context-sensitive adjectives admit to being modified by adding words like 'enough' which can then be followed by something of the form, 'for an X' where 'X' can denote a class, or even a purpose or function. For instance, 'tall' and 'far' are paradigmatic examples of context sensitive terms and it makes sense to say things like 'S is tall *enough to be a good center' or 'my job is far *enough to justify purchasing a bike.'  We can also say things like, 'the water is clear *enough to swim in' or 'the diamond is clear enough to impress my soon to be fiance.' In fact, by adding 'enough' all we're really doing is making explicit the modifier that is often present, tacitly. The point is, rather than there being just one meaning to such predicates like 'clear' there are many depending on the context. 

So what 'clear' or 'clarity' mean both with respect to historic Christianity and what Paul meant in Romans 1:20 needs to be understood against various contexts. Gangadean contends that it means something like "maximally provable" or "cannot be (rationally) doubted." One way to motivate such a view would be against the background of eternal punishment as you suggest: that is, when you ask about whether God's existence is clear, you're really asking whether it is clear *enough to make unbelief justifiably punishable by eternal damnation. 

Here are some reactions to this:

1) Why think this requires Gangadean's notion of clear as "can't (rationally) be doubted?" In other words, I'm asking for an argument for Anderson's line, "maximal consequences entails maximal clarity." He never gives an argument for it, but treats it like a platitude. In other words, suppose as you suggest that God is justified in damming people for all eternity for failing to be in a particular mental state regarding his nature. What about this suggest to you that his existence should be clear in just the way that Gangadean provides? If you just find it obvious, then you're banking on an intuition that I honestly don't share. In fact, it gets worse. As I've pointed out before, even if God's existence were clear in the Gangadeanian sense, this isn't sufficient to make God justified in damming the unbeliever insofar as one also accepts the Calvinist doctrine that the unbeliever simply can't believe without having God change them in some fundamental way. And Gangadeanians are Calvinists in the pertinent sense. In other words, Gangadean wants to motivate his theory of knowledge (as G-knowledge) so that it's fair that unbelievers end up in ever-increasing spiritual death. But his Calvinism commits him to the view that the unbeliever can't possibly know what is clear without God changing their hearts (giving them Grace). What the clarity thesis attempts to provide the Calvinist doctrine takes away as previously noted here. 

2) How do we know that even G-knowing something actually exemplifies achieving maximal clarity in the relevant sense anyway? For instance, Gangadean's theory of knowledge says nothing about the distinction between synchronic and diachronic belief-states. It is one thing to G-know a proposition at an instant of time, and quite another to G-know it over a span of time. Supposing that maximal consequences entails maximal clarity it's possible that maximal clarity actually demands more than Gangadean's conception does. For instance, maybe we should posit a theory of F-knowledge--where it's the sort of knowledge that stably spans over a significant period of time. Lest, you respond that it's simply not possible for humans to achieve this kind of knowledge, I would ask you for proof that isn't merely a generalization from your own experiences and observations. Interestingly, if we were to go this route I would think that there will be some subject-relativity since I would imagine different people have different abilities as it regards "hanging onto a belief" over a span of time. My point of course is not to motivate such a theory, but to suggest that by relying on the same assumptions to which Gangadean appeals in motivating G-knowability, we can proliferate at least another higher standard of knowledge. That seems like a bad result and thus a reductio against the general move Gangadean is making.  

*3) Here's what I think is a particularly devastating problem. It's actually question-begging to cite theses from a particular reading of "historic Christianity" and a "proof text from the bible" as informing one's theory of knowledge in the current dialectic. That's getting things in reverse. It certainly isn't getting to G-know basic things from reason alone because in making such a move Gangadean is already assuming that there is such a thing as special revelation.  

In other words, here are the terms of the debate as I understand them. Gangadean offers a theory of knowledge from "reason alone." I challenge the conclusion that it's the correct theory. Gangadean appeals to Christian doctrines and bible passages which he thinks his theory of knowledge makes the best sense of (purportedly adding abductive support of this theory as the correct one). That's viciously circular.  We haven't yet settled that Christian soteriology is true, or that the bible (in any part) is true or the word of God---that's further down the line! We're at the more fundamental issue of what it means to know something so it's question begging to appeal to christian doctrine or "proof texts" to motivate your theory of knowledge. I've noted this here before. 

4) If Gangadean's theory of knowledge (or even the two-kinds of knowledge view) is being motivated by the worry that it would be unjust for God to create the universe in such a way that nonbelievers are eternally damned, then that still doesn't entail he's right. As I've mentioned earlier, maybe Gangadean's proposal about the eternal damnation of nonbelievers is wrong itself. For instance, a universalist about salvation would see no tension between the lack of G-clarity regarding God's existence and the purported "maximal consequences"---because they believe that no one will actually face those maximal consequences. That is, they could agree (not that they should) with Gangadean that maximal consequences entails maximal clarity, but then deny maximal clarity (in the Gangadeanian sense) because they believe (for independent reasons) that what Jesus did on the cross was so efficacious that it will ultimately save all i.e., that no one will be left in unbelief. 

On to the second part of the commenter's response--they wrote:

Does it follow that if basic things are E-knowable, they are not transcendentally necessary? Why think that if reason "as the laws of thought" is E-knowable, it cannot also be G-knowable? Wouldn't everything that is G-knowable also be justified according to lower evidential standards as well?

I think there's some confusion in this comment. G-knowing something marks a higher epistemic standard than E-knowing that same thing. If there is an entailment at all, it's only going to be in one direction namely, "If S G-knows that p, then S E-knows that p" which is contrary to what is suggested at the beginning of this comment. 

In fact, I don't know whether all that differs between the proposed two different kinds of knowledge are epistemic standards, so the above stated entailment might not even hold. For instance, they might be significantly different states--or belief-states that arise in significantly different ways--I have no clue---that would be for the Gangadeanian who wants to make use of this move to specify. 

The last sentence seems to cut in the other direction. It's suggesting the entailment I just mentioned. Again, I don't know how the two purported kinds are supposed to relate to one another--that's for the Gangadeanian to flesh out. But it's far from obvious that the set of all G-knowable propositions contains the set of all E-knowable ones. 

Two Kinds of Knowledge?

A recurrent theme of my posts is that on Gangadean's theory of knowledge we know next to nothing. I take that as a reductio against his theory of knowledge because I take it that we know lots of things. Among the things which Gangdean's theory of knowledge invariable should make one skeptical about are propositions like, "the bible is the word of God" or "the bible is divinely inspired." The reason that this is the case is that Gangadean's standards for knowledge are impossibly high--we just can't seem to prove that the bible is the word of God. We might have various reasons to believe that it is so, but they fall short of proof. I would think that such a result is particularly troubling for the Christian that is moved by Gangadeanian epistemology. That is to say, a Christian wanting to maintain Gangadean's theory of knowledge (where knowledge requires certainty) ought to find it especially worrisome that such a theory entails that knowledge that the bible is really the word of God is impossible to attain. After all, Christians hold dearly to the scripture in guiding their lives--and the assumption that it contains divine truths is largely why this is so.

One way to resist this result is to simply say that we don't need to know things of the sort--maybe it's not important to know that the bible is special revelation. Perhaps it's enough to have a reasonable belief that it is so. But I doubt that any Gangadeanian would find that acceptable. 

Another option would be to deny that Gangadean's theory actually leads to skepticism of the sort I've argued for. This is usually how Gangadeanians respond, but it's proven difficult for them-- Gangadeanian's are in my experience ill-equipped for the task including Gangadean himself. The arguments are just not there. 

Finally, a third option is to fight for a new conceptual distinction and shall be the topic of this post. This was actually suggested to me once by Anderson although in a very tentative way. I was raising some of the very issues that I've explored in this blog about the worry of skepticism which seems to follow from Gangadean's demanding theory of knowledge. It was then suggested by Anderson that perhaps there were really two kinds of knowledge: one requires certainty and the other doesn't. We can have knowledge of the former kind of only "the most basic things" and yet we have knowledge of the latter sort (the one that doesn't require certainty) of a larger scope of propositions---you know, like everyday propositions (e.g., that I have hands). 

To make things easier let's label these two kinds of knowledge thusly: Gangadeanian knowledge which requires epistemic certainty = G-Knowledge (or in verb form, G-knows) and the latter sort we'll call E-Knowledge (or E-knows, in verb form) which is short for "everyday-knowledge." Here are some critical questions that we should consider in light of this proposal. 

1) Does it actually solve any of the problems it's supposed to?

2) Is it independently motivated so as not to be ad hoc?

3) How do we draw the boundary line between the things we can only E-Know and that which we can G-know? 

With respect to 1), if there were two kinds of knowledge constituted by different evidentiary standards, then it would seem that some of the bite of skeptical worries is assuaged. So that's a virtue of the proposal. As I've argued before, you can't know much of anything on Gangdean's theory of knowledge. A wife couldn't possibly know that she is waking up next to her husband each morning because it's at least possible that he was switched at night with a facsimile--or that her perceptual faculties are playing a trick or her (e.g., she's hallucinating that it's her husband). That for Gangadean means she could not know that the being next to her is her husband. That makes the theory silly of course. By suggesting that there are actually two kinds of knowledge we can make Gangadean's theory seem a little less silly in this way. The idea would be that while you can't G-know things like, "I am not hallucinating right now" you can at least E-Know it. Remember E-knowledge has lower standards than G-knowledge or so the argument would go. 

Unfortunately for the Gangadeanian wielding this distinction, it solves one set of problems only to introduce new ones. The problem is that by proliferating kinds of knowledge, we run into a value question. Why should we care about G-knowledge at all? If both E-knowledge and G-knowledge are species of knowledge, then why is one to be desired over the other particularly if one has far more applications than the other. Can't a person, even according to the two-kinds of knowledge-Gangdeanian, E-know that God exists on the basis of intuition or experience or by testimony or evidentialist approaches to apologetics? And if so, why do they need anything else? In other words, we need an argument explaining just why G-knows, given how hard it is to come by, is desirable, valuable, or necessary. Why must a person G-knows that God exists rather than merely E-knowing that it is so? Of course, there's a value question about knowledge even when we're only thinking about one kind of knowledge and a significant body of literature on the topic, but introducing another kind only makes the question more pressing particularly when the claim is that we can know some things in one sense, but not the other. 

As to 2), the quick answer is that it's more certainly ad hoc. Anderson tentatively proposed it in a conversation in order to save his theory from a serious problem. Suppose it solves the very problem it's purported to solve--- that doesn't make it true or give us reason to think it's true. We need independent grounds for that. I could come up with a very different theory of knowledge and in the face of counterexamples suggest more and more kinds of knowledge--but that doesn't make my theory or the patches true. This is why it's important to ask for independent motivations i.e., reasons to believe that there are two kinds of knowledge which have nothing to do with the problem that it purports to get around in order to preserve Gangadean's theory of knowledge (which is the very thing in question). 

3) The issue here is how we can determine which things are in principle E-knowable, but not G-knowable. If you could do this then you could figure out just which things are G-knowable. It's no good in the current context for the Gangadeanian to say that "the most basic things" are sort of by definition, G-knowable. Here's why. Gangadean's argument for his theory of knowledge is predicated on the idea that skepticism follows if the basic things are not clear (G-knowable). But the two-kinds of knowledge thesis is meant to undermine the skeptical worries in the first place. So skepticism at least of one sort is defanged but out goes with it the transcendental argument for the necessity of clarity of basic things (i.e., the G-knowability of basic things).

Even if the basic things aren't clear (in the G-knowable sense), admitting that there are two kinds of knowledge allows that the basic things could be clear in the E-knowable sense. That makes the transcendental argument that Gangadeanians favor no good, here. This brings us back to our discussion in 1). What makes G-knowledge worthwhile? Valuable? Desirable? Why should we care about it at all? Why not just stick with E-knowledge of both the less basic and the more basic? It's knowledge after all! 

An egregious argument for the veracity of the bible.

My apologies for my absence as of late--my days have been quite busy. Anyway, today I found myself perusing the page of the Tempe, AZ chapter of Ratio Christi (which is run by a Gangadeanian) and I encountered the following argument. 

1. God’s existence and God’s moral law are clear to reason.
2. Humans have failed to know God and obey the moral law.
3. God cannot forgive without atonement.
4. Only the Bible shows how sin is atoned for.
5. Therefore, the Bible is true.

In my view, the Gangadeanian worldview is fraught with bad arguments. But this one is particularly offensive. In fact, it was this very bad argument that was sort of the "last straw" for me when I was still a member of the congregation. That is, it was this very issue concerning how it is that we could know (with Gangadeanian certainty) that the bible was the word of God (i.e., genuine special revelation) which eventually got me kicked out of the church. It was this issue initially which lead to discussions with Gangadean and others where I was able to see just how spurious Gangadean's reasoning really is and how closed off he is to having his basic beliefs examined critically. In a way, I owe a lot to this bad argument. 

So onto the content. The main issue that arises is that Gangadean's impossible epistemic standards for knowledge, held consistently, leads to skepticism. One area that this skepticism will be most strongly felt for the Christian is on the matter of the veracity of scripture. So the Gangadeanian offers an argument to show how we can come to know (with Gangadeanian certainty) that the bible contains only truths. Note, I'm setting aside the complicated question about what all is entailed by the claim that the bible is "special revelation" or "divinely inspired." After all, it isn't obvious that divinely inspired text needs to be infallible or inerrant--likewise, infallibility and inerrancy of a particular text is also not sufficient to make it "divinely inspired." For now let's just focus on the infallibility claim. 

My claim is that the Gangadeanian argument above, call it the egregious argument for the veracity of the bible (or the EAVB for short) is both invalid and also such that a Gangadeanian ought not to accept any of the premises as true, based Gangadean's own professed epistemic standards. 

If you've been around these parts you know that premise 1) is false. God's existence is not "clear to reason". Perhaps it seems subjectively obvious to Gangadeanians, but that's not enough. Gangadean simply fails to prove that the God of Christian theism exists at least according to his own standards of proof. I won't get into much detail on this point since I've already written about it, but basically he takes for granted the assumption that reality is composed only of 2 possible substances, matter and spirit. He argues against the eternality of matter and, by way of disjunctive syllogism, he "deduces" that what is eternal must be spirit. But he never bothers to prove the dichotomy (all is either spirit or matter and nothing else) to begin with. Furthermore, his argument against the eternality of matter (really he's got to show that it's logically impossible for matter to be eternal) are also bad. He appeals to empirical findings which by their very nature are not going to provide proofs in the sense that he demands. He merely claims that we lack positive reason to believe that matter is eternal which isn't the same as having shown that matter can't possibly be eternal (compare: I don't have any evidence to believe that bigfoot exists vs. it's logically impossible for bigfoot to exist). So much for premise 1). 

At the risk of being pedantic, let me note that premise 2) is clumsily stated. It reads, 'Humans have failed to know God and obey the moral law.' Philosophers and linguists call that a generic statement and this is an issue about quantification. What premise 2 doesn't say is "All humans have failed to know God". Nor does it say "at least one human has failed to know God...". All generics like, 'Dogs have four legs' are weird because they don't fit nicely within the scheme of quantifiers in standard logic. Just ask yourself how many dogs need to have 4 legs in order for the statement, 'Dogs have four legs' to be true? Half? 1 more than half? 1/3? Who knows...

Surely, though, the Gangadeanians believe that "All humans have failed to know God..." I know this not only from personal conversations, but also because being the Calvinists that they are, they believe in doctrine of total depravity. But this gives way to a problem. If the argument above (EAVB) is given in order to prove that the Bible contains only truths, then we can't assume any of its teachings to be true in giving the argument--that would be to assume what you need to prove. Now Calvinists generally adopt the 5 points of Calvinism based on a certain reading of the bible which presupposes the bible is true (at least the pertinent "proof texts"). What this means is that for a Gangadeanian to believe that all humans have failed to know God, they must have independent (non-scripture based) proof that all humans (present, past, future) will fail/have failed to know God and to obey the moral law.  But how can Gangadean, his followers, or anyone for that matter come to prove a thing like that? 

Notice what won't work. I can already hear a Gangadeanian appealing to the presence of natural evil in particular, in the form of physical death. If we can know that all humans are mortal (assuming we could know a thing like that with Gangadeanian certainty), then we can know that all humans are afflicted by natural evil, and this shows that they are basically sinners which is failing to obey the law and further this is fundamentally failing to know God despite its being clear that God exists. 

There are at least two problems with this approach. As I flagged above, they would need to prove that all humans are mortal (past, present, and future). I'm not saying I doubt this claim. I assign a very high credence to the proposition that all humans are mortal. That's not the point. All I'm saying is that my grounds for believing this (induction or some presumption that it's part of the concept of a biological entity that it is mortal) doesn't satisfy the Gangadean's demands for certainty.  So I'd press Gangadean for a proof from indubitable premises to the conclusion that all humans are mortal (i.e., a proof for the claim that all humans are afflicted by natural evil as a call back from moral evil). 

Second, and more substantially, as I've already shown, Gangadean helps himself to lots of assumptions when he speaks of the function and nature of natural evil (and it's relation to moral evil) in his failed attempt at giving a theodicy. These assumptions are load-bearing, but they remain unsupported assumptions and so ultimately fall under pressure. So to move from 'all humans get old and die' to 'all humans have sinned' is tenuous at best. Of course, premise 2) could be true (we can say that about a lot of propositions), but the point is Gangadean and his standards for justified belief and knowledge require that he prove its truth beyond all doubt. So the Gangadeanian ought not to accept premise 2). 

Premise 3) God cannot forgive without atonement.

I've called into question this premise before as well.  What I noticed is that Gangadean "supports" claims like this on the basis of some mysterious lexicon of the English language. Basically, Gangadean has in mind a particular (and quirky) notion of justice. But as I've shown elsewhere, there's no way for him to prove that his concept or definition of 'justice' is the correct one. He can indoctrinate his followers with his special dictionary till the cows come home, but surely he doesn't get to decide the meaning of a word in a given language or the content of a concept by fiat! Nor should we assume he has some privileged access to the "correct concept" or "correct definition." 

More importantly, his views on the nature of divine justice are simply confused. As I've already argued elsewhere, a priori, there's no reason why God cannot forgive without atonement. The whole Christian idea of divine grace via the passion of Christ is anything but the kind of justice that Gangadean has in mind which is basically "treating things according to their kind" or "treating like with like." As I've posed before, how can the sins of the world be "justly" taken on by a single person (Jesus) who is without sin? That is far from "treating like with like." So premise 3) likewise seems false.  One thing to keep in mind in thinking through the appropriateness of this premise (and the others) is this: in the current dialectic Gangadean can't dip into the bible as proof texts to support it--that would be question begging since the truth of the claims that make up the bible is the very thing at issue. 

Premise 4)  Only the Bible shows how sin is atoned for.

This is just plain silly. How on earth can anybody know that the bible is the only written text in the entire world/universe (both past, present, and future) which shows how "sins are atoned for"?  Remember Gangadean requires certainty for knowledge. On this standard, it's hard to see how anyone could know that premise 4). I'm merely asking him to make good on his own requirements! The answer of course is that there's simply no way to know premise 4) with any amount of certainty because it's an empirical claim! 

Furthermore, as I've raised before, there's a problem of criteria. On Gangadean's worldview, we need the bible (or special revelation) to tell us how divine mercy interacts with divine justice--that's the whole bit about "how our sins are atoned for".  The idea is that we can't possibly figure this stuff out by reason alone. It was not possible for us to connect the dots from general revelation (what we know from reason alone) to the contents of the gospel message and that's why we have the good news given to us via divine revelation. Otherwise, if we could reason to it all, we wouldn't need a message from God in the first place! But if we can't reason to the correct account of how we are to be forgiven of our sins, how are we to know (with certainty) what it is that we're looking for? That is, how are we to recognize the correct account as the correct one? It seems like we need to know what makes for a correct account of the atonement of our sins in order to recognize the correct one as such, but if we know what makes for a correct account, then we don't need special revelation. 

Finally, the argument above is simply invalid. That is to say, the premises, even if they were true wouldn't entail the truth of the conclusion. For one thing, "the bible is true" is again a kind of generic statement. Presumably, what the author of the EAVB intends is that every claim in the bible is true. But it's not clear how the truth of the premises would entail that. See here where I discuss this point and others I've raised above in more detail. Since validity is necessary for soundness, the argument is unsound. So what you have here is the worst kind of argument--sort of the "opposite" of a sound argument. It's invalid and all the premises are false.