Tuesday, May 7, 2024

So-Called Properly Basic Beliefs

Christian apologists like William Lane Craig and Paul Copan assert that some things are properly basic beliefs, simultaneously either denying the inherent truths/absolute certainty of logical axioms (as Craig has done) or claiming that something like morality can be rationally assumed, an impossibility, due to arbitrarily persuasive experience.  The contradiction of a properly basic concept being justification to believe something that does "not require" a verifiable basis for belief can only be false.  The presence of one's own mind is self-evident and absolutely certain, but this is because of logical necessity, not intuition or mere perception.  In turn, logical axioms are true in themselves and thus verify themselves and ground all other truths.  Hypothetically, people could posit different beliefs as properly basic, but some overlap is usually present.  In the case of such apologists, things like God's existence (more specifically, a very particular deity), the existence of other human or animal minds, objects in the external world bring exactly as they appear, and morality are assumed under this guise.  

Some of these are provable and some are not, though there is fallible, probabilistic evidence for them, but assumptions are not knowledge: either self-verification like with axioms or logical deduction is necessary for proof, which is a requirement of knowledge.  One cannot think to even deny or doubt the existence of one's own self as a conscious being (not other details about one's nature) without already existing.  More central than this, axioms like the fact that truth exists or that one thing which logically follows from another is necessarily true, all of which one's own mind metaphysically and epistemologically depends on, could not be false without being true.  It is impossible for them to be anything other than intrinsically true, absolutely certain (if one is not just assuming them, that is), and supremely foundational.  They are the starting point of all actual knowledge, including one's recognition that one exists.

With God's existence, however, apologists like Craig might think themselves justified because of a personal "sense" of divine presence, as he has said of the Holy Spirit, or because of an irrelevant and extremely vague intuition.  Oh, an uncaused cause exists [1], and it probably is the Christian Yahweh, but its existence is not in any way verifiable because of subjective emotional perceptions or existential longings.  It exists due to and is knowable through logical necessity.  Besides, many people think their assumed idea of God's existence automatically would entail a deity of benevolence, kindness, and fairness, when God might be aware of us but amoral, oblivious to our lives, or in possession of a moral nature that would make killing every living thing we encounter the true righteousness.  If not strictly this kind of generically "kind" deity, or whatever differing things people might mean by kind, they might believe the further assumption that it is their own culturally popular form of theism that would have to be true.

Even if God's mere existence was knowable through spiritual introspection, a impossible thing, it is not as if many details about God would be revealed this way.  This issue is not the only thing certain Christian apologists might say one can legitimately assume--as if such a thing could possibly be rational--on the basis of perceptions or "intuition."  The existence of an external world of matter is ultimately provable, but far more difficult to know than many people seem to think, and, like the philosophically apathetic masses, these apologists think "knowing" the reality of an external world is done by just passively perceiving objects that might not even truly match with our sensory experiences at all.  They think we could know by assumptions (a conceptual contradiction) that we have not hallucinated much of the eternal world or that we are not a brain ina vat whose immaterial consciousness misperceives the physical landscape outside of it.

Now, with morality, they seldom if ever distinguish between moral preferences, feelings, and obligations.  If obligations exist, whatever they are (to not murder, to kill everyone, to steal, to not steal, etc), they are what one should honor.  One's wishes would be of no more relevance or weight than the wishes of someone who believes or wants for logical axioms to be untrue.  Failing to fully if ever distinguish between an obligation and conscience or a social norm, moral intuitionists like William Lane Craig overlook many things in their assumptions.  It does not logically follow from having a feeling or desire that something is good or evil no matter how visceral the experience is.  Conscience is subjective and thus only necessitates the objective truth that there is conscience, not that there is anything morally good.  Also, if people have conflicting moral feelings, though feelings could never prove morality anyway, their moral preferences could not all be true, but all or most of them could be false.

Only a fool goes by intuition in the form of conscience or unverifiable sensory perceptions as it is, but of course it is always their own moral feelings that they believe are aligned with righteousness.  Someone who objects or who simply has a different conscience might be treated as if they err because a certain moral idea is allegedly true, but the given moral idea is assumed to be true on the basis of their own personal subjectivity.  Not only do they commit all the fallacies of conflating subjectivity for objectivity and assumptions for known truths, but they also think their own cultural practices or personal are the ones that turn out to be true, not those of anyone else who believes something else from the same invalid basis.  One never has to assume something that is true and knowable.  One could know it instead!  I believe in the existence of an uncaused cause and an external world [2] of some kind because I can prove they exist by logical necessity.  They are neither self-evident nor intrinsically true, nor are they obvious on their own, only true and knowable in light of particular prerequisite logical facts.



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