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Guys, let me say that I actually wish your version of foundationalism was true. As far as I can tell, it is not. I'm not advocating weak foundationalism as a breakthrough that will make us able to settle debates easily and reach confident conclusions on all issues. I'm advocating weak foundationalism because, unfortunately, this seems to be how justification actually works. And if we look at our epistemic practice, this does reflect experience. We don't spend our lives progressively constructing one edifice of knowledge that gets progressively larger as we learn more and is never undercut. We build one structure, then it gets torn down by some new argument, so we build another structure, and that one gets torn down too. Oftentimes a person who knows more than we do will come along and demolish our carefully constructed position on some issue. Think about how many ideologies you have been through in your life - most people convert a few times during their lives. It just doesn't seem like we're building on a single, firm foundation. You can say that this is because we're all making epistemic errors if you like. However, I think it's implausible to claim that a twelfth century peasant who grew up hearing about God from his friends, knew that all the learned people believed that God existed, heard of the accounts in the Bible, and had no other source of information, was not justified in believing that God existed.

I don't see any substantive objections in this post, just lots of question begging. Sorry.

As there are no firm, certain foundations for all knowledge, a reasonable person constructs his worldview as best he can based on limited information and according to what seems true. This necessarily means that a rational person's worldview will be constantly shifting and, insofar as he lacks information, always somewhat uncertain. I see my job as being to introduce a little more information into your worldview to help you grasp a little more of reality than you presently do, and maybe (as I hope) I'll get some helpful information from you in return. We're talking about what's called "epistemic seeming" here, which is what you're inclined to believe taking into account all of your beliefs and experiences at a given time. For example, if you think it seems true that there is an apple on the table, that means that when you've taken into account all of your beliefs and (say) the experience of the apple on the table, you're inclined to believe that there's an apple on the table.

I can't see why that's problem for the theory. It would be a problem for the theory if two contradictory beliefs could be true according to it, but that's not what it says. It only says that two contradictory beliefs can be justified for different people at the same time. I don't know what you're up to here, sorry. The criterion would be seeming true.

I'm not sure what that means.

Yeah, weak foundationalism is a pretty jarring epistemology to someone steeped in classical foundationalism. "What?? You mean to say that all knowledge doesn't reduce tidily to self evident axioms?? You mean to say that there is no simple way to settle disagreements??" Yes. Yes, I do. The referents for justification would be the beliefs that seem true. It's easy.

Then, on weak foundationalism, you would be justified in believing that weak foundationalism is false. I see no problem here.

This isn't really an objection to Swinburne's epistemology as far as I can see. You're just saying, "Swinburne's epistemology isn't the Objectivist epistemology." Well, so what?

How does it follow from the success of science that we need to reduce everything to sensory data, though? I don't see how that follows. What about theoretical entities (e.g. electrons)? How do you reduce them to sensory data? Finally, I'd point out that science arose within a Christian context. There's some reason to think that science depends on a worldview like Christianity, where there's a foundation for the laws of nature we observe in the character of God.

Yes, I know what Christianity is. You did make me laugh, though.

Perhaps so, but I have a lot of spare time on my hands and an ample bookshelf to draw arguments from. Sorry, I'm not understanding you. What are you doing in this passage? Are you making a positive argument against the existence of God, or are you claiming that there's no evidence for the existence of God, or what? This seems to beg the question against my argument, which attempted to establish precisely that a paucity of sensory data does not necessarily make a claim arbitrary. I assume I'm not understanding you somehow. Why? You must know that you can't just reject Swinburne's epistemology without a reason. We're not even to the point of defining God yet, as far as I can tell. We're discussing epistemology as a preamble to talking about God.

Like much of what you have written to me, this does not address my argument. I don't know what flavor of Christian I am yet.

Okay, I've figured out what the root of our disagreement is. People here apparently believe that they have a method of reaching the truth, "reducing concepts to reality," which all knowledge must conform to. I will need to undermine your confidence in this epistemology before we'll be able to make any progress, because otherwise you'll just assert that you already know that any argument for God must fail because the claim that God exists cannot be reduced to the data of sense. So, loosely following an argument of Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, I claim that this epistemology fails because it is self stultifying. There is no way to reduce the claim, "all claims must be reduced to the self evident data of sense," to the data of sense. It's an arbitrary assertion. An epistemology which demands that we begin with self evident or incorrigible claims will always be self stultifying for this reason. (Rand's view is a form of what is called classical foundationalism, which is defunct.) Therefore we have to back off from this epistemology. I suggest that it is more reasonable to adopt weak foundationalism, on which a claim can rationally be accepted under less stringent criteria than those which Rand laid down. For example, Swinburne's weak foundationalism suggests that a belief can rationally be accepted if it simply seems true to the agent. On Swinburne's epistemology, we then weave together these beliefs which seem true into worldviews as best we can as the evidence comes in. So, even if you somehow establish that the claim that God exists cannot be reduced to the data of sense, that doesn't imply that theism is unjustified. Theism could still follow from claims that seem true (or itself be a claim that seems true). I'll leave it there for now, because I'm sure you guys have a lot of criticism for me.

I'm not convinced that there's much of anything to the Objectivist theory of concepts. I've read ITOE, and I didn't see anything there that would turn a person into a cognitive Übermensch capable of effortlessly out-thinking people who've spent their lives on a subject. This is one of the reasons I left Objectivism. Rand writes in a very vague style that gives the impression that she's saying something really important, but dissolves when you put it under the microscope and try to figure out what she meant.

Yeah, but it seems absurd to say that you know that God doesn't exist and that the concept of God is incoherent when even the people who argue about God for a living apparently don't know that. It's a little like the creationists, who claim to know that evolution did not happen in spite of the nearly universal dissent of the relevant scientists (don't take that the wrong way; it's just the first analogy that came to mind). Thanks for clarifying. I don't think that the concept of God presupposes that examination by reason will be fruitless. Could you explain why you think that it does? 2046 seems to be making a number of points, so maybe you could tell me which point you meant to indicate here. The main point which I got out of that post is that it's not necessarily a problem for Objectivism that Objectivism is behind on philosophy of religion, because the new arguments in philosophy of religion are all arbitrary. I'm not sure how 2046 knows that these new arguments are arbitrary when the people working in the field apparently don't know that, though.

My apologies. I usually don't point people to books and websites as much as I've been doing in this discussion. I think I'm doing it a little more in this discussion because people are claiming that theism is incoherent and arbitrary as if these claims are uncontroversial. I'm trying to get across that (1) there's a big body of rigorous philosophical literature on the existence and coherence of God and (2) it's academically respectable to argue for the existence of God in philosophy - it's not a "given" that God is incoherent and arbitrary.

There are many ways that I could respond to this. Suffice to say that I invest a pretty big portion of my time into discovering whether or not my current position on the existence of God is correct, and have done so for at least the last couple of years. Swinburne's The Coherence of Theism is a sustained argument for the conclusion that theism is coherent. Do you think that the reasoning in this book fails? If so, why?

Okay. I don't think that there would be a universe if there was no God. God sustains everything logically contingent (other than himself, of course). Thanks for the question.

I'm not sure why my beliefs should come into it at all. It should just be about the logic. Since you bring it up, I've read OPAR several times, as well as The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged and a lot of Rand's nonfiction. I was really into Objectivism in high school and early college, but since then I think I've found some holes in the philosophy. I don't think most people would describe me as a Christian per se, but I've begun reading a Christian philosopher and theologian named Richard Swinburne, and I think I find his worldview more plausible than Ayn Rand's. In any case, I'm not here to convert people away from Objectivism. As you can see, I just started this thread because I thought the members of the forum would be interested to read a Christian's responses to Objectivist arguments in philosophy of religion. If the moderators think it looks like I'm trying to proselytize, obviously they can close the thread or move it to debates.

Collins just seems to be saying that the constants (and so forth) need to fall within a seemingly very precise range. His language doesn't necessarily imply that there's someone setting the constants. That's fine.

Okay, so you're just wondering what Collins means when he says that the universe is fine tuned. He explains that on page 204 (the third page). "3 Fine-tuning of the universe; existence of a fine-tuned universe; fine-tuning evidence; fine-tuning data. To stay in conformity with the literature, I shall mean by the “fine-tuning of the universe” or the “existence of a fine-tuned universe” the conjunction of the following two claims: (i) the claim that the laws and values of the constants of physics, and the initial conditions of any universe with the same laws as our universe, must be set in a seemingly very precise way for the universe to support life; and (ii) the claim that such a universe exists, or when the background information includes the information that there is only one universe, the claim that this universe is life-permitting, where this is an indexical that picks out the one universe that actually exists. When I speak of the “fine-tuning evidence (data),” or “the evidence (data) of fi netuning,” or variations of these, I shall be referring only to claim (i). The reason for this is that “evidence” and “data” implicitly refer to what physicists have discovered. Clearly, physicists have not discovered that the laws, constants, and initial conditions are lifepermitting since we always knew that based on our existence. Rather, they have discovered claim (i). When I attempt rigorously to formulate the argument, the distinction between claim (i) and claim (ii), and the distinction between the “fi ne-tuning of the universe” and the “fi ne-tuning evidence (or data)” should be kept in mind. "4 Fine-tuning of a constant C of physics. When discussing a constant C of physics (see Sections 2.3 and 4.2), I shall use the term “fine-tuning” specifically to refer to the claim that the life-permitting range of C – that is, the range of values that allows for life – is very small compared with the some properly chosen “comparison range” for that constant. (For how to choose this comparison range, see Sections 4.3 and 4.4.) In connection with a constant C, the term “fine-tuning” will never be used to include the claim that it has a life-permitting value." I do not understand that distinction, and I'm not sure that anyone else does either. You're free to try to explain it.

Collins presents this syllogism on page 207 (the sixth page): (1) Given the fine-tuning evidence, LPU is very, very epistemically unlikely under NSU: that is, P(LPU|NSU & k′) << 1, where k′ represents some appropriately chosen background information, and << represents much, much less than (thus making P(LPU|NSU & k′) close to zero). (2) Given the fine-tuning evidence, LPU is not unlikely under T: that is, ~P(LPU|T & k′) << 1. (3) T was advocated prior to the fine-tuning evidence (and has independent motivation). (4) Therefore, by the restricted version of the Likelihood Principle, LPU strongly supports T over NSU. All of the acronyms and terminology are explained on pages 202-206. I don't know if that's sufficiently reduced for your purposes, though. I happen to own a copy of the (much less rigorous) book The Rationality of Theism, which is a collection of short essays by the top defenders of various theistic arguments. We can discuss Collins' presentation of the fine tuning argument in that book instead, if you'd like. Cool. I think this is Hume's objection to the cosmological argument, correct? Swinburne refutes it as follows in The Existence of God (p. 134): "From time to time various writers have told us that we cannot reach any conclusions about the origin or development of the universe, since it is the only one of which we have knowledge, and rational inquiry can reach conclusions obly about objects that belong to kinds, for example, it can reach a conclusion about what will happen to this bit of iron only because there are other bits of iron, the behaviour of which can be studied. This objection has the surprising, and to most of these writers unwelcome, consequence, that physical cosmology could not reach justified conclusions about such matters as the size, age, rate of expansion, and density of the universe as a whole (because it is the only one of which we have knowledge); and also that physical anthropology could not reach conclusions about the origin and development of the human race (because, as far as our knowledge goes, it is the only one of its kind). The implausibility of these consequences leads us to doubt the original objection, which is indeed totally misguided. "Uniqueness is relative to description. Every physical object is unique under some description, if you allow descriptions that locate an object by its spatial position - that is, by its distance and direction from named objects. Thus my desk is the one and only desk in such and such an apartment; and that apartment is the penultimate one on the left in a certain row.... My desk has in common with various other objects that it is a desk; and with various different objects, that is weighs less than a ton, and so on. The same applies to the universe itself. It is, for example, like objects within it such as the solar system, a system of material bodies distributed in empty space. It is a physical object and, like other physical objects, has density and mass. The objection fails to make any crucial distinction between the universe and other objects; and so it fails in its attempt to prevent at the outset a rational inquiry into the issue of whether the universe has some origin outside itself." The analytic theists (Swinburne, Plantinga, et al.) have refuted a lot of the Enlightenment objections to the arguments for God. News of this has, generally speaking, not reached the internet atheist community as yet.

I'm not really in it for weeks of logic chopping on this forum, but you can read Collins' fine tuning argument here if you're interested in an example of the quality of reasoning that the analytic theists are producing: http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Collins-The-Teleological-Argument.pdf

The paper claims that some new developments have been made in philosophy of religion since Rand's time. This is, of course, indisputable. These new developments include: The kalam cosmological argument (ancient Muslim philosophers developed early versions of it, but Craig has developed it significantly in recent decades) The fine tuning argument The ontological arguments of Plantinga, Hartshorne, and Maydole Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism The moral argument (developed with an eye to the implications of evolution by several authors) Plantinga's concept of theism as a properly basic belief Swinburne's argument from religious experience The argument from consciousness I don't think Objectivists have responded to any of this stuff. Isn't that a problem? Edit: I just thought of a really good way to put this point. The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, published in 2009, is arguably the best defense of theism ever written. It is about 600 pages of dense, carefully argued theistic reasoning. To my knowledge, there is not a single argument in this book which you could refute with anything in the Objectivist literature.

He talks about the burden of proof on page 203.