rationalskepticism.org

Cito di Pense wrote:

Hugin wrote:Here is a piece that basically argues the same as the OP. It makes sense to me.

You can treat science as a methodology that uses 'reason' without going down the rabbit hole of trying to establish the constituents of 'reason'.

I agree - science can simply bracket the whole issue, and take 'reason' (that is, its reliability) as a given.

You can treat other approaches as 'discourses' (methodologically speaking). Discourse is like a 'talking cure'. Sometimes it works, but you don't really know how it works. I think it works by getting you to think about something other than what was bothering you.

Sounds like Foucault + later Wittgenstein.

I read Sweenith like a book, when he starts talking about 'innate knowledge'. He's after the sensus divinatus.

Well - for one thing, personally, I don't yet have a settled position on justification - I'm sympathetic to both Plantinga's "Reformed Epistemology" model (which appeals to Calvin's "sense of the divine"), as well as Paul Moser's version of evidentialism (and on Moser's view, theistic belief is justified a posteriori — i.e., not innate)

And secondly, even on Plantinga's view of justification according to which theistic belief is grounded via the "sensus divinitatus," belief in God is not innate, because (according his work in WCB), given that our faculties are functioning properly in the sort of environment for which they were designed, we come to perceive the divine in and through our experience in much the same way that we come to perceive the natural world. But on Plantinga's account, the sense of the divine no more provides us with innate knowledge of the divine than our sense of the empirical provides us with innate knowledge of the empirical - in either case, knowledge is only attained a posteriori.

Come to think of it, I'm not really sure which, if any, prominent view of religious epistemology regards belief in God as innate (in-born). The only one that comes to mind is natural law theory, according to which natural laws of morality are without exception known by all persons. Theistic natural law theorists would hold that such knowledge entails knowledge in God, since one such precept is, for example, the wrongness of mocking God. Though natural law theory is making something of a comeback, it's not at all the majority view of theists. So for the most part, you don't have to worry about your religious interloculars smuggling innate ideas into the conversation (unless they're Thomists).