Hello everyone!As someone who was raised in a Christian household but has recently undergone a period of questioning in his life (for a number of reasons, though as I understand this isn't uncommon and is in fact encouraged by some Christians), I've committed quite a bit of thought to the relation between religion and epistemology. The question of how one could or ought to rationally justify his or her belief in God, and how such a belief can exist coherently within a rational belief system, is an extraordinarily complex and fascinating problem. I've tried to approach the question in a religious-neutral context - that is, argue to my conclusions without presupposing the validity of either theism or atheism. I suppose my question will become clear by the end of the post.I should probably begin by outlining the fundamental points of my own epistemological system. The first major hump that I had to get over in my search for properly justified knowledge was the realization that I cannot objectively presuppose any particular epistemological foundation. I came about this conclusion by looking at the problem of the foundationalist infinite regress. The gist of the problem is this: Each piece of knowledge that we have must in turn be justified by some other piece of knowledge. If I hear the sound of a bird chirping, for example, the chain of justification may go something like this:A) There is a bird nearby. How do I know that there is a bird nearby? Because
I hear a bird chirping. How do I know that I hear a bird chirping? BecauseC) I have heard birds chirping in the past and that is what they sound like. How do I know that I have heard birds chirping in the past and that that is what they sound like? BecauseD) I have thoughts held vividly before my mind in memory describing the sound of a bird chirping, and they correspond closely to the sounds that am I hearing. How do I know that...And so on. It quickly becomes clear that this chain of justification is going to go on forever, with no end in sight. To strip away the example and put it in logical terms:A) Suppose that I know a statement P. If I know P, it must be justified in some way.
The only thing that can justify a statement P is another statement (call it P1).C) For P1 to be a satisfactory justification for P, I must know P1, and in turn P1 must be justified.D) The only thing that can justify a statement P1 is another statement (call it P2.)E) For P2 to be a satisfactory justification for P1, I must know P2...Again, the problem of the infinite regress arises in the same way. We're going to run into this problem for for any piece of knowledge that we purport to have. Some have attempted to solve the problem by claiming that there are certain pieces of knowledges/truths that are self-evident. I don't find this argument terribly convincing, for reasons that I'll elaborate upon further if asked about them specifically (the long and short of it is that we can't possibly even conceive of the notion of self-evidence without other ideas already in place, and our concept of what is self-evident is invariably colored by a presupposed and unjustified epistemological framework).I do, however, end up proposing a solution that is somewhat similar to this. The problem, to summarize what we've realized thus far, is that we can't seem to find a way to get off the ground. Where can we find that justified "first belief" that allows us to justify everything else in turn? The way that I am going to address this problem is this: There are certain beliefs that inform all other beliefs that we presuppose without any justification for them. I will call these foundational beliefs. These beliefs are, in the strictest sense, irrational, because we haven't justified them rationally, we've just adopted them for whatever reason. Perhaps they move our passions in a certain way, perhaps we simply need to grasp at something to start up those whole epistemological enterprise. But they're there. Think of them like axioms.I should note that many foundational beliefs, though they are irrational, are shared by the vast majority of people. Examples of commonly shared foundational beliefs would be the legitimacy of basic logical rules and principles of induction, trust in our empirical sense data in the absence of something that would cause us to believe otherwise (things we see, hear, smell, touch, etc.), and so forth - these are "common sense" beliefs. None of them can be justified in absolute terms - i.e., in the absence of any other knowledge - but that's no mark against them; after all, nothing can be logically justified in the absence of any other knowledge. We simply presuppose them because, well, they're useful.Once we have foundational beliefs in place, we can then begin to form a framework of contingent beliefs which are justified by virtue of these foundational beliefs. I think that the vast majority of our beliefs can be justified by the combination of the legitimacy of a) basic logical laws and
trust in empirical sense data. To go back to the example of the bird chirping, we would no longer have the problem of an infinite regress. We would be left with:A) There is a bird nearby. How do I know that there is a bird nearby? Because
I hear a bird chirping. How do I know that I hear a bird chirping? BecauseC) I have heard birds chirping in the past and that is what they sound like. How do I know that I have heard birds chirping in the past and that that is what they sound like? BecauseD) It is a basic axiom of my belief that I can trust what I hear. That's obviously a very dumbed-down version of it, of course. But hopefully you get the idea. And those foundational beliefs, or axioms of belief, are what are powering this entire epistemological engine. All other beliefs that we have are either contingent upon these foundational beliefs, or are not justified beliefs. The vast majority of our beliefs are contingent; it will likely only be a select few that are foundational. And, most of us will probably share the same foundational beliefs (like trust in our senses or logical laws) - but there is no logical imperative stopping us from adopting other beliefs as foundational as well.This is where religion comes in, and this is where I will make my fundamental assertion about the relation between religion and epistemology. It is possible that belief in God can be justified as legitimately as the belief in rationality, but it must be either as a foundational belief, or as a belief contingent upon a very unconventional set of foundational beliefs. Nothing is stopping us from simply presupposing God as one of the primary axioms that informs all our other beliefs. Indeed, this may well be what faith is all about, isn't it? So, in one sense, religion is as rationally justified as rationality itself. However, there are several important points that we must bear in mind about all this.1) When I say that religion is as rationally justified as rationality itself, I mean that, like rationality, it is not justified at all. It is simply an epistemological concession that we need to make.2) This does not mean that religion can be justified contingently from rationality. Indeed, if one were to adopt only a) basic logical laws and
trust in one's sense data as their foundational beliefs, then I think religion could not be justified. So, those who wish to reconcile any objective statements about religion with science and logic are out of luck.3) Religion could be justified contingently, but anything can be justified contingently if we have the right foundational beliefs. My foundational belief may be "I should believe whatever my mother tells me" (which of course is irrational, but then so are all foundational beliefs), and if my mother happens to tell me that, say, Scientology was correct, then I would be justified in believing it. Of course, (almost) no one would adopt this belief as foundational, but what's important is that we remember whether it's a foundational belief, or whether it's something we're bound to by foundational beliefs.So that's the long and short of my epistemological system. I personally didn't happen to have my passions moved by the concept of any particular religion, so I didn't adopt it foundationally. And I certainly don't see any way in which any religion could be justified contingently by my own belief system (in other words, justified rationally, though by all means, I confess my own ignorance on that particular subject and I'm certainly open to any suggestions).And that leads me (finally!) to my question. How do you, personally, consider your belief in Christianity to be epistemically justified? Was belief in Christianity simply something you presupposed as a cornerstone of your entire belief system, as a matter of faith? Or would you object to my statements, and say that Christianity can be argued to rationally? I ask this out of a genuine desire to understand the mindset that leads one to Christianity, and to see if it could possibly resonate with my own. At the moment, of course, I'm confused on how one could reconcile belief in Christianity - or any religion - with the axioms of belief that I have adopted and that I believe most people have adopted. But I certainly don't have the audacity to write off all theists as ignorant or stupid - I fully expect this to be enlightening (hopefully for the both of us!)Thanks for reading all this. I hope it wasn't too long.
