Evidentialism

[Rolling_Stone]

Evidentialism says that we should refrain from asserting as truth something for which there is not enough available evidence. Some evidentialists even go so far as to say that if we do not have enough evidence in a uncertain case, we should not make a decision on it. Either way, it is argued that we have no right to believe a religious claim in the absence of sufficient evidence, usually only recognized as such if it in some way measurable. But the absence of evidence is not evidence. Appealing to the lack of evidence as an excuse for disbelief or to illustrate reason for disbelief in an Ultimate Source of ideal-values is demagoguery, often making use of people’s naiveté, prejudices and uncertainties to instill doubt as to the validity of certain values. Evidentialism has little relevance in a religious endeavor, where sayings like “the map is not the territory” and “the finger pointing is not the moon it’s pointing to” are commonplace. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen” is a clear indication that faith is concerned only with the grasp of ideal-values.

Human beings will always be in the position of being able to believe more than they can know, and if they cannot penetrate to true origins, they will invent them in order to have constancy of thought. For no matter how sound the reason, indeterminate answers (like “chance,” “I don’t know” and “just because”) bear indeterminate fruits— and a society can neither be built or maintained by such fruits. The values required to build and maintain a society do not grow out of disunited or undirectionalized wish fulfillment, emotional frustration or even reason.

A final explanation of phenomena and contingent beings can only rest in what itself requires no explanation. An ultimate explanation must, therefore, always be of a religious nature. “God” is a word symbol designating its personalization and signifying a wholehearted devotion to a reality-conception which the believer deems to be of supreme value to himself and for all mankind. Does this mean that everything in life is thereby clarified and explained? Does it mean we are justified in dismissing evidence that cherished beliefs are wrong? Of course not! But if changing our existing cognitive stance requires us to reject or doubt a vast number of our current beliefs, and if there is no evidentiary or positive reason to do so, it is more rational not to take the new cognitive stance than to take it.

Any thoughts?

 

[StephenSmith]

Are you referring to all religion or a specific one in posing these questions above? Just curious.

Such an approach I think would be impractical. I think all belief carries an element of faith, that is to accept something without having the absolute proof of its veracity. Even atheism requires it in the absence of absolute proof that there is no God. Daily life also requires faith. The gardener planting a seed has no guarantee of the budding flower in the summer. Setting out on a journey is taking a step of faith as there is no guarantee of reaching the destination. If we needed conclusive proof of everything before doing anything or believing anything we would do and consequently have - nothing.

My 2c

Regards
Stephen

 

[Dunemeister]

Evidentialism is simply flat wrong (as you've described it. First of all, evidentialism cannot meet its own criterion, thus making it self-refuting. So on that basis alone, we should look elsewhere for an epistemological standard.

Second of all, evidentialism is too strong. It discounts beliefs for which it seems we should take for granted yet cannot produce evidence for. For instance, I believe I had breakfast. I can't produce any evidence. All I can give you is my word. But, sensible fellow that you are, you aren't happy to take me at my word. You demand evidence. But that seems a bit brutish. If I tell you that I had breakfast, you can have confidence of the truth of "Dunemeister had breakfast." It seems churlish to say you don't really know whether I had breakfast, doesn't it?

Second, it's too weak. There are beliefs for which people have plenty of evidence, yet we are not quite willing to say they have knowledge. We can point to any number of criminal cases in which a person was convicted using all proper procedures and rules of jurisprudence, and yet later we find out they're innocent. So did we know back then that he did it? How can we possibly "know" something that's false?

Third, what counts as "evidence" anyway? The skeptic wants the believer to furnish evidence for their belief. Fair enough. The believer points to cosmology (there's something rather than nothing). "Not enough," says the skeptic. She points to design features of the universe. "The design is only apparent," says the skeptic. She points to history, such as the resurrection of Jesus. "That can't be true because we know such things don't happen," says the skeptic. She points to her personal experience of God. "That's just a psychological phenomenon and doesn't point to any objective reality outside the self," says the skeptic. Well, at this point the believer might be forgiven for thinking that the skeptic has rigged the game. And when the game ends, the skeptic walks away smugly, satisfied that the believer is deceived or in some other way epistemologically woe-begotten. The believer walks away feeling uneasy, perhaps suspecting that maybe the skeptic has a point, yet also feeling that somehow she's been tricked. She has been.

Let's try another strategy. Christians might propose the following. Humans are created with a capacity to perceive both God and moral truths. This capacity has been damaged. The damage causes poor "reception" so that our perceptions about God and what is right is blurred, out of focus, and sometimes completely mistaken. God takes the initiative to undertake repairs in at least some people's cognitive and affective faculties so that they can see God and perceive moral truths aright -- or at least begin the process of learning how to "see" these things (much like a blind person whose physical sight is restored generally require lots of training to perceive depth, color, and so forth). These people are much more likely to get things right, but we can still expect problems of "resolution" or focus.

The Christian might tell a story like this. If this story is true, and if the cognitive repair spoken about applies to Christians of a certain type, and if the person making the claim is this sort of Christian, then her Christian beliefs are warranted.

Notice the conditional form of this argument. If the skeptic wants to say that the Christian is irrational in her beliefs, the skeptic must show that this epistemological picture is untrue. But to do that, the skeptic must demonstrate (in the strongest possible sense) the falsity of Christian belief. Good luck.

 

[tomspug]

It sounds like a useful way to distinguish 'faith' from 'evidence'. I think that there are some areas that faith does not belong, such as a courtroom or the floor of a political body. However, evidentialism as you have described it does not sound very useful in religion.

Because evidence becomes less reliable over time, if religion is judged by evidence, then it will inevitably become less believable the longer the religion exists. Theoretically, the Bible would have to be rewritten constantly to keep it in an historically reliable context.

Religion is less about evidence and more about principle. For example, there is no way to reliably provide evidence for Moses and the Ten Commandments any more than Homer and the Odyssey. Not only is evidence of both of these (whether or not they actually occurred) is such an impossible task to accomplish to confirm as an individual historical event (apart from the documents that attest to them), but evidence itself is completely irrelevant to the value of these stories.

For Moses, the idea of God establishing law for his people is far more important than the question of whether or not God wrote that law onto stone with his own hand. For Homer, it is the moral of each of the stories in the Odyssey that is important.

In this respect, evidentialism (while it has its uses) serves very little purpose in religion.

 

[Fluffy]

Essentially I agree with your critique of evidentialism although I think it has several problems in addition to this.

To be completely clear, Evidentialism makes the claim that if there is no evidence for a belief then we are not justified in asserting that belief as true. It does not stray into making valued judgements on what we should or should not do. Whether we should be justified in our beliefs is, itself, a matter of debate and evidentialism does not comment upon it. It merely attempts to indicate when a belief is justified and when it is not. Of course many evidentialists will have an answer to the question "Should we prefer justified beliefs to unjustified ones?" but the debates are entirely distinct.

I think the most coherent, well formulated and clear definitions of evidentialism is this: "A belief is justified only if it is proportioned to the evidence." This definition is taken from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy and is described as "initially plausible". I can't understand why. To me this would be better described as "seemingly absurd". The very obvious response to this claim is articulated concisely by Dunemeister "evidentialism cannot meet its own criterion, thus making it self-refuting. So on that basis alone, we should look elsewhere for an epistemological standard." Plantinga popularised this

The Humean response to this criticism relies precisely on the distinction I drew above, that there is a difference between saying "These beliefs are unjustified" and "You should not believe in these beliefs because they are unjustified". Hume identified a number of things that could reasonably be described as "incorrigible" and yet also unjustified. For example, he suggested that all human beings believed in the process of cause and effect and yet since we never experience "causation", this belief is unjustified. On the other hand, it seems impossible to give up our belief in causation. Other beliefs which are incorrigible according to Hume include the belief in induction and the belief in sensory data. If the belief in evidentialism is stated precisely and also taken to be unjustified but incorrigible then we might be able to turn it into a reasonable epistemology.

However, it is clear that the majority of evidentialists are not Humean and so do wish to overstate their case as you describe. The Humean position is still damaging to theism although Plantinga has many challenging responses to that as well. The alternative is Wittgenstein's incommensurability thesis which Tomspug points out. In this sense, evidentialism and faith are not at odds because faith has no epistemic content for evidentialism to talk about. Unfortunately, this position appears to be in the extreme minority.

 

[Dunemeister]

Personally, I think any theory of knowledge that relies on an account of "justification" is bound to fail. In this, I have been convinced by Alvin Plantinga's work. So it's no accident to hear echoes of his thought in my posts.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

But the absence of evidence is not evidence.

No, the absence of evidence is not proof. The absence of evidence is often evidence of absence, and sometimes extremely good evidence, of absence.

 

[Rolling_Stone]

"A belief is justified only if it is proportioned to the evidence."

You made some good points, and I am familiar with the above definition and agree with it. However, the way it is used in RF and most everywhere else, "evidence" is limited to what's in the objective world. Reason is the ability to show correlation between within and without, and so long as it is reasonable, evidentialists have no reasonable objection to belief in God.

 

[Dunemeister]

No, the absence of evidence is not proof. The absence of evidence is often evidence of absence, and sometimes extremely good evidence, of absence.

And it's often the theist who's accused of being irrational....