Author’s Abstract- One popular conception of natural theology holds that certain purely rational arguments are insulated from empirical inquiry and independently establish conclusions that provide evidence, justification, or proof of God’s existence.
- Yet, some raise suspicions that philosophers and theologians’ personal religious beliefs inappropriately affect these kinds of arguments.
- I present an experimental test of whether philosophers and theologians’ argument analysis is influenced by religious commitments.
- The empirical findings suggest religious belief affects philosophical analysis and offer a challenge to theists and atheists, alike: re-evaluate the scope of natural theology’s conclusions or acknowledge and begin to address the influence of religious belief.
Sections- Religious Belief and Philosophical Argument
- The Modal1 Ontological Argument
- An Experiment
- The Robustness of the Empirical Results and Challenge
- From Magisterial to Ministerial Reason
- Conclusion
Comments - Religious Belief and Philosophical Argument
- "Bourget (David) & Chalmers (David) - What Do Philosophers Believe?" (Section 3.9 / Table 10) shows that greatest correlation between Specialisation and view is comfortably that between Philosophy of Religion and Theism.
- Bourget & Chalmers’ take on this is “These results suggest that there is such a thing as specialist opinion in philosophy, whether or not specialists are more likely to be right.” This remark applies to all the correlations found, so doesn’t imply any anti-religious bias.
- My view is that – in the case of Theism – it’s (these days) such as a polarising view that – in general – a person would only adopt a specialism in the Philosophy of Religion if they had a special interest in Theism, which would only tend to be if they
- are a theist, who remains convinced by the arguments
- had been a theist but is no longer convinced by the arguments and thinks the issue important enough (or had sufficient “sunk costs” in the subject) to persist with, or
- are atheists who consider theism to be a virus that needs eradicating and consider it their public duty to crusade for this end.
The bulk of philosophers (these days) are probably atheists or agnostics (Bourget & Chalmers only have 10% down as “decided theists”) and consider Philosophy of Religion not something worthy of their attention. - So, I don’t think the correlation between Philosophy of Religion and espousal of Theism is a sinister (or salutary) connection.
- However, Tobia only uses it as a motivator for his Experimental Philosophy exercise – which (while unmotivated in my view) does reveal bias in the evaluation of arguments – both by theists and atheists – and therefore needs investigation.
- The Modal2 Ontological Argument
- An Experiment
- The Robustness of the Empirical Results and Challenge
- From Magisterial to Ministerial Reason
- Conclusion
Comment: - Penultimate draft - non-citable.
- See Link.
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)
- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2018
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)