This article about Agnosticism intrigued me. The article looked at six different theories of the belief and in the end came to the conclusion that none were backed by facts or proof. I like this because far too often people argue religion but don’t have valid facts against the claims made my religion.
I found myself quite confused by this article. My understanding of agnosticism was that they do not except of deny the existence of god. They find that there is not enough evidence to convince them one way or the other. With this understanding I am very confused as to how you could say the view is true or false when the view itself never claims anything to be absolute. The reading focused on their view on one particular topic I understand, whether or not there are justifications for intervening or nonintervening for god and for humans. The arguments used seemed repetitive and there were many items addressed that seemed more like tangents to the topic at hand then a relevant part of the argument.
The Howard-Snyder argument was a little bit better than yesterday’s reading, however, I am still not satisfied. I feel as if these arguments against God’s existence are going nowhere where the arguments towards God’s existence were presenting more intriguing arguments. Is this to say something other than neither of these arguments are going to come to a conclusion? Even Howard-Snyder says at the end of his paper that his argument fails and proceeds to ask our help. This sounds exactly the same for yesterdays, the day before that, and even Monday’s paper. Is this saying that philosophers are leaning more towards God’s existence than God’s nonexistence? Who’s to say either way, if philosophers can’t even say it.
I thought Daniel Howard-Snyder’s Epistemic Humility, Arguments from Evil, and Moral Skepticism was an O.K. reading. Not one of my favorites, but not one that I hated either. I felt that he kind of went off on tangents a little bit and did not fully explain some terms. However, I liked how he used real life situations for us to consider and the simple uses of A and B. I thought this paper was well constructed and well thought, however a bit dry in some parts.
I wasn’t too keen on this reading to be honest. The most glaring reason is because he spelled skeptical with a ‘c’ the entire reading; I realize that he wasn’t wrong in doing so, but come on, spelling it with a ‘c’ is a bit archaic. He did make an interesting proposition however that I do find interesting, and that is we as humans have no idea what God’s ultimate goal is. And because we do not know this, how can we possibly say there is gratuitous evil in the world? Maybe what’s gratuitous to us isn’t gratuitous to God. We just don’t know, and we have no idea that we don’t know.
Also, he didn’t define what certain, what I consider to be, important vocabulary terms – namely, beyond-our-ken. I had to Google it just so I wasn’t going blindly through the rest of the reading; for those of you who didn’t look it up, it means ‘beyond-our-understanding’.
I found it interesting that there is this idea, which is supported by evidence in the bible, that there are divine lies. If God is lying to people, why do they still believe him? I certainly think that if I were lied to by God, I would not believe him to be in existence until he showed himself to be in existence. As for TDD, I believe that Wielenberg is simply stating that if God is lying to people, there is skepticism in the argument of “the only reason we have for believing in P is that God told us P.”
I was just wondering if anyone else had a hard time understanding todays reading. I don’t know if it was the way that the reading was worded or what but it was difficult for me to get through. I mean I think I understood what the key arguments were trying to say. But I was having a difficult time understanding how or what the author was applying them to. Which brings me to the question what exactly was the author arguing for/against. If anyone can help clarify this for me that would be great because I feel a little lost and I’d like to understand what we are being taught. Thanks
I too felt this article was way above my head and I had a very difficult time following him. I honestly did not really understand what he was even arguing against. I also feel like the explanations he had were not very well written. I would also like to comment on his last statement, I do not feel like the evidence he provided gave him the right to say that christianity is internally incoherent, especially because of Alvin Plantinga’s statement “God might have reasons that we cannot so much understand.” To me, this sums up the entire argument that Wielenberg struggled to maintain.
I feel as if the author didn’t fully explain why the TDD argument posed such a threat to skeptical theists. He makes the point that, if TDD is sound, then it is unreasonable for skeptical theists to take God at His word, but I thought that’s what they were already doing: taking things with a grain of salt. It seemed to me that skeptical theists have an understanding of Christianity where they cannot be entirely sure what is the ultimate truth and, therefore, don’t make any sorts of serious conclusions about anything. Did I interpret this incorrectly or did anyone else experience this confusion?
Also, did anyone else notice that the author spelled the word “skepticism” incorrectly throughout the entire article?
Epistemic Humility, Arguments from Evil, and Moral Skepticism
I agree with what many others have said about this reading. While it was a very interesting philosophical argument, there were very few references to the existence of God. It seemed like much of the reading would relate back to the problem of evil and whether or not it shows evidence for or against the existence of God. By the time I was into it, I had already forgotten that that was a point of discussion early on. Other than that, it was interesting. I wasn’t expecting the story of Ashley’s suffering to figure into the conversation the way that it did, and I was much more satisfied with the philosophical debate it presented, rather than what I was expecting: a simple argument for atheism based on the fact that a benevolent God wouldn’t allow it to happen.