Philosophy

The technical failures were real and were the main reason positivism collapsed. The self-refutation objection was one of the criticisms, raised early within Wittgenstein’s circle and pressed later by Putnam and others, not the only one. On Popper: falsificationism is a criterion for distinguishing science from non-science, not for what may rationally be believed, and Popper himself explicitly denied that metaphysical claims were meaningless. So the successors to positivism do not rescue strong scientism; they abandon it.

The concern is fair, which is why Moreland is paired here with the Stanford Encyclopedia and with a secular survey of the debate. His formulation, that only what is testable by science can be true, is not a caricature; it is close to statements by Alex Rosenberg in The Atheist’s Guide to Reality and to popular claims by Dawkins and Krauss. If you want the view in its own defenders’ words, Rosenberg is the place to go, and he says it more bluntly than Moreland does.

Weak scientism is the serious version, and it has to be answered differently, which the last exhibit under this claim does. Strong scientism is worth refuting because it is common in popular form (if you can’t prove it scientifically, it’s just opinion) even if no philosopher defends it. The real challenge, the demand for evidence, is met elsewhere: the historical and philosophical arguments across this site are exactly the attempt to supply evidence of the kind weak scientism allows.

This is the right follow-up, and conceding weak scientism costs the Christian nothing in principle but raises the bar in practice. Weak scientism does raise the bar for non-scientific claims, and the Christian response is to meet it: historical claims are assessed by historical method, philosophical claims by philosophical argument, and both are legitimate ways of knowing that weak scientism does not exclude. What weak scientism cannot do is rule those methods out in advance, which is what the strong version tried to do. The rest of this site is the attempt to clear that raised bar.

This is the strongest form of the reply. A methodological rule still needs a justification, and the justification (this method is reliable) is a substantive claim about the world that is not itself a scientific finding. One can adopt the rule pragmatically, but then one has conceded that at least one important belief, the rule’s own reliability, is held on non-scientific grounds, which is the point. The rule survives as a preference; it does not survive as a limit on what can be known.

This is the strongest objection to using abduction in apologetics. The reply is that God did it is not offered as a bare hypothesis but as part of a broader view, theism, that makes specific predictions: that the universe has a beginning and is orderly, that moral facts exist, that a certain sort of religious history would occur. Its explanatory power is assessed by comparison with the naturalistic view on all those data together, and it can be disconfirmed: a universe with no moral facts, an eternal past, or a Jesus who stayed dead would each count against it. Whether it wins the comparison is the debate; that it can be entered into the comparison is what this claim defends.

The entry does canvass the objections, and the honest summary is that the status of abduction is debated among philosophers of science while its use is nearly universal. The vagueness of best is real. Lipton’s answer, explanatory virtues such as scope, simplicity, and fit with background knowledge, is the standard way of making it precise, and it is the way the resurrection argument on this site tries to proceed: name what each hypothesis explains and fails to explain, rather than declare a winner.

Loveliness is Lipton’s technical term for explanatory depth and unification, not aesthetic appeal, and he argues at length that it tracks likeliness. The bias worry is real but symmetric: naturalists find naturalistic explanations lovely. The corrective is public criteria, which is why the arguments on this site try to state what each hypothesis explains and what it leaves out, so that you can check the scoring rather than take the verdict on trust.

The bad lot objection comes from van Fraassen, and Lipton answered it. The worry applies to every use of abduction, including in science, and the standard response is to ask whether the field of hypotheses has been searched thoroughly. In the resurrection case, two millennia of skeptical effort have produced a small, well-known set of alternatives (hallucination, swoon, theft, wrong tomb, legend, visionary origin), which is about as thorough a search as any hypothesis gets. If the lot is bad, it is not for want of looking.

A fair distinction. Peirce’s abduction is the logic of hypothesis formation, and the modern inference to the best explanation (Harman, Lipton) extends it to justification. The arguments on this site use the modern form. Peirce is cited for pedigree, and his own view of the justificatory step was more cautious than the modern one, which is worth knowing when someone invokes his name.

Correct, and Aristotle would agree. His point is that a principle that cannot be argued for without being used is not thereby weak but foundational. Presupposed by all argument is the more accurate description than proven, and it is the stronger claim, since anyone who tries to deny the principle has to use it to state the denial. That is what his negative demonstration shows.

A sophisticated Buddhist or Hindu interlocutor might make this move, and it deserves an answer. Dialetheists themselves hold that true contradictions are rare and isolated (the liar paradox, certain boundary cases), and no dialetheist claims that ultimate reality is personal and ultimate reality is impersonal can both be true. Anyone who does claim that has abandoned the possibility of saying anything false about religion, including the claim that Christianity is wrong. The move buys nothing for the pluralist that it does not also cost.

The irony is real; Ryle would not have been sympathetic, and his university example was deflationary by design. But a concept can be correct even if its author applied it in a direction one rejects, and only the concept is used here. The critic’s counter-charge is fair and is the actual debate: are moral facts a real category, or a category mistake? That question is taken up in the Relativism and Atheism cases. What is claimed here is narrower: that science can’t test it, so it isn’t real is itself a category mistake if there are non-physical categories, which is the question rather than the answer.

The disagreement is about the semantics, not about whether the error is real; on either account the sentence goes wrong by mismatching kinds. The use here requires only that demanding a physical test for a non-physical claim is an error of that sort, which both camps accept. Whether the resulting sentence is meaningless or merely false, it is not a good argument.

Proper functionalism is contested, and this whole claim is an argument to weigh, not a settled result. The core move does not depend on the details, though. On any theory of warrant that ties it to reliability or to the belief’s origin, whether religious belief is warranted will depend on whether it is true, which is the conclusion drawn here. The argument is robust across theories of warrant that make warrant depend on facts outside the believer’s head, which is most of them.

This is the standard objection and Plantinga’s reply is worth knowing. The argument is not any belief is warranted if true but this particular belief has a plausible account of how it could be warranted if true: a divinely installed sense of God, a widely reported human phenomenon across cultures. Great Pumpkin belief has no such account and no community of experience. The conclusion is not that Christian belief is warranted, only that the critic who calls it irrational has to argue that it is false. Whether that shifts the burden fairly is debated; it is not nothing.

This is the objection from religious diversity and it is the most serious challenge to Reformed epistemology. Plantinga’s response is that the sensus divinitatis produces the basic belief in a God or transcendent reality, which is widespread, while specific doctrinal beliefs come through additional means (for the Christian, the Holy Spirit’s testimony to Scripture). Critics reply that this only relocates the problem. The claim survives in a weakened form: the charge of irrationality still requires an argument about truth, but the diversity of religious experience is itself part of the evidence to be weighed.

Correct, and it does not prove God and should not be sold as if it did. Its value is to clear away one bad objection (you’re irrational unless you can prove it) so that the evidential arguments elsewhere on this site can be assessed on their merits. Plantinga himself offered two dozen or so theistic arguments in addition to this defense. The other cases are where the positive argument is made; this one only removes a reason not to look.

This is the strongest reply to the parity argument. Plantinga’s response is that belief in God is close to universal across cultures (the sensus divinitatis point) and is often involuntary for those who have it; its denial is not self-defeating, granted. So the analogy is partial. The narrower point survives: Clifford’s rule, taken strictly, would forbid many beliefs everyone holds, so it cannot be the standard, and a weaker standard has to say why belief in God specifically fails it. That is an argument about evidence, not about the ethics of belief, and it is welcome.

Fair; Clifford does give a consequentialist argument for his rule. The precise point is that the rule is not believed on the basis of the kind of evidence the rule itself demands, since the argument from harm is a moral argument, not empirical proof that the rule is true. That still shows the rule needs non-scientific support to stand, which is the point. A moral argument for an epistemic rule is a perfectly good thing to have; it just cannot be the only kind of reason allowed.