Category Archives: Philosophy

General Apologetics, Miracles, Philosophy, Skeptics

Is Testimony Really That Unreliable? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In the previous post, we talked about the role of testimony in our everyday lives.  There are some, however, who cast serious doubts on the reliability of testimony.  Here is a typical quote from a skeptic who commented on this blog:

As we all should know, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. There are numerous examples of situations in which large numbers of people have individually presented eyewitness testimony which has later turned out to be false (UFO sightings are a case in point). Numerous trial convictions hinging on eyewitness testimony have been shown to be wrong when the evidence is analyzed more fully.

Here is what is interesting to me.  First, note that the skeptic fails to give a balanced account of testimony, in general.  Why, for example, doesn’t the skeptic note that there are also numerous examples of large numbers of people who reported testimony that turned out to be true?  With regard to trial convictions, the skeptic does not remind us that the vast majority are never overturned because the eyewitnesses got it right.  We only hear about the overturned convictions because they are so rare.

The second thing to note, and this is really important, is that the only way the skeptic knows about most of the cases where large numbers of people got something wrong, or that trial convictions have been overturned due to false testimony, is through other testimony!  The skeptic did not personally experience most of these cases himself.  He had to hear about these cases from other people (through books, blogs, magazines, etc.) who did, supposedly, experience these cases.  So, in tearing down the reliability of testimony, the skeptic must rely on testimony.  This approach is clearly self-defeating.

Here is another typical quote:

In thinking about the past, we can only reason about unknowns using knowns. Among the knowns are the laws of science and the propensity of eyewitnesses to make mistakes. Among the knowns when it comes to tales of supernatural events are human foibles such as prevarication, gullibility, superstition, wishful thinking and ignorance.

Notice the skeptic’s negative outlook on eyewitness testimony.  He says that we know when people report supernatural “tales” that they prove to be gullible, superstitious, ignorant, and engage in wishful thinking.

How does the skeptic know these things?  You guessed it: through testimony.  The skeptic relies on the testimony of people he trusts to tell him that most people who report supernatural events are gullible, superstitious, and ignorant.  Here again, the skeptic tears down the reliability of testimony by relying on testimony.

At this point, the second skeptic may cry foul and say the following: “I was specifically writing of testimony about supernatural events, not testimony in general.  So there is nothing wrong with me using testimony from people I trust to back up my claims.”  And he has a point; it seems he may have escaped the self-defeating approach of the first skeptic.  However, it leads to another difficulty.

In the next post, we will discuss this difficulty and wrap up this series on the reliability of testimony.

General Apologetics, Miracles, Philosophy, Skeptics

Is Testimony Really That Unreliable? Part 1

28 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

There are 3 ways that a person can gain knowledge: experience, reason, and testimony.  Experience simply means that we observe something directly with one of our five senses for ourselves (e.g., “There is a computer screen in front of me”).  Reason means that we make rational and logical inferences from knowledge we already have to new knowledge (e.g., syllogisms).  Testimony means that we gain knowledge by hearing it from another person (e.g., “Napoleon was a short man”).

For the average person, it would seem that much of what we know about the world comes from testimony, from facts we hear from other people.  Think about it.  If you just start listing in your mind all the things you know about every sort of subject, a tremendous amount of it you read in books, were taught by teachers and professors in school, read on a blog, and heard from your friends and family.

We rely very heavily on testimony because as a person who is limited in space and time, we cannot possibly experience everything directly that we want to know.  Any knowledge you have about places in the world you’ve never been is because of testimony.  Any knowledge of people whom you have never met is because of testimony.  Any knowledge of human activity from before you were born is known from testimony.

Let’s take two special cases of where testimony is used: law courts and human history.  Every day, criminals are convicted of serious crimes based on evidence from testimony.  Attorneys and judges always want to know who saw what.  There are other kinds of evidence used in courts, to be sure, but there is no doubt that our legal system would completely fall apart if testimony was disallowed.

Are there sometimes mistakes made by witnesses in recalling what they saw?  Sure there are.  But often the way we know a  mistake was made is because of someone else’s testimony!  In other words, we trust one person’s testimony about the facts over another person’s testimony.  We don’t just throw out all testimony and call it all unreliable.  We work to determine whose testimony is credible by using standard criteria.

What about human history?  The truth is that just about everything we know from human history is based on testimony.  We read written accounts left behind by people who directly experienced the events of history.  Are there testimonies from history that we think are false?  Absolutely.  How do we know they are false?  Often because they contradict other testimony that we trust more.  Without testimony, however, we would know precious little about anything that happened before we were born.  Historians, like jurists, employ criteria to discern which testimony from history is credible and which is not.

If testimony is so important to our everyday lives, to our legal system, and to our knowledge of history, then why do skeptics of Christianity seem to downplay its reliability so much?  We tackle that in the next post in this series.

Philosophy, Science and God

Why Is Scientism Self-Refuting?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

More times than I can count we have skeptics comment on the blog who insist that science is the only means of attaining knowledge.  If you don’t believe me, just read the comments underneath last week’s blog posts.  I have covered this topic numerous times, but it seems to surface over and over again, which tells me that we are touching upon a fundamental disagreement between two worldviews.  In other words, this is a pivotal issue for everyone to understand.

So, I call back to the stand again Professor Edward Feser and his book, The Last Superstition.  When confronted with the assertion that only scientific reasoning gives knowledge (justified true belief), how shall we respond?

There are two problems with this view (which is known as “scientism” or “positivism”).  First, if they want to take this position, they will need to defend it and not simply assert it; otherwise they’ll be begging the question against their opponents and indulging in just the sort of dogmatism they claim to oppose. 

Feser makes an important point here.  It is not enough to merely say, as skeptics sometimes do, that scientific reasoning is the only way to know things, and then just leave it at that.  This viewpoint may be fashionable among atheists and skeptics, but among the rest of the populace, it just doesn’t fly.  The vast majority of thinkers from pre-Socratic Greece to today reject the assertion that scientific reasoning is the only way to know anything.  Given that fact, we expect an argument to be made.

Second, the moment they attempt to defend it, they will have effectively refuted it, for scientism or positivism is itself a metaphysical position that could only be justified by using metaphysical arguments. 

How so?  Why can’t science argue for science without employing metaphysical arguments?

Of  its very nature, scientific investigation takes for granted such assumptions as that: there is a physical world existing independently of our minds; this world is characterized by various objective patterns and regularities; our senses are at least partially reliable sources of information about this world; there are objective laws of logic and mathematics that apply to the objective world outside our minds; our cognitive powers – of concept-formation, reasoning from premises to a conclusion, and so forth – afford us a grasp of these laws and can reliably take us from evidence derived from the senses to conclusions about the physical world; the language we use can adequately express truths about these laws and about the external world; and so on and so on.

Notice that none of these are claims of science, are they?  As Feser explains, “Every one of these claims embodies a metaphysical assumption, and science, since its very method presupposes them, could not possibly defend them without arguing in a circle.  Their defense is instead a task for metaphysics, and for philosophy more generally; and scientism is shown thereby to be incoherent.”

Feser ends this section with a brilliant quote of philosopher E. A. Burtt:

Even the attempt to escape metaphysics is no sooner put in the form of a proposition than it is seen to involve highly significant metaphysical postulates.  For this reason there is an exceedingly subtle and insidious danger in positivism.  If you cannot avoid metaphysics, what kind of metaphysics are you likely to cherish when you sturdily suppose yourself to be free from the abomination?  Of course it goes without saying that in this case your metaphysics will be held uncritically because it is unconscious; moreover, it will be passed on to others far more readily than your other notions inasmuch as it will be propagated by insinuation rather than by direct argument. . . . Now the history of mind reveals pretty clearly that the thinker who decries metaphysics . . . if he be a man engaged in any important inquiry, he must have a method, and he will be under a strong and constant temptation to make a metaphysics out of his method, that is, to suppose the universe ultimately of such a sort that his method must be appropriate and successful. . . . But inasmuch as the positivist mind has failed to school itself in careful metaphysical thinking, its ventures as such points will be apt to appear pitiful, inadequate, or even fantastic.

Philosophy, Science and God

Is There a War Between Religion and Science?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

This canard has been repeated so often that it is now part of 21st century folklore.  Contrary to this popular myth, philosopher Edward Feser, in his book  The Last Superstition, correctly points out that the “so-called ‘war between science and religion’ is really a war between two rival philosophical worldviews, and not at bottom a scientific or theological dispute at all” (emphasis in original).

On one side is the worldview derived from the “classical philosophical vision of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas.”  The other side, that of materialistic secularism, derives its premises from the likes of Hobbes, Hume, Descartes, Locke, and Kant.

Feser presents candid comments from several modern scientists and philosophers who admit as much.

The physicist Paul Davies tells us that “science takes as its starting point the assumption that life wasn’t made by a god or a supernatural being.”  Feser further quotes Davies as saying that partially out of fear of  “open[ing] the door to religious fundamentalists . . . many investigators feel uneasy about stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they freely admit that they are baffled.”

Feser continues by quoting prominent contemporary philosophers.

Tyler Burge opines that “materialism is not established, or even clearly supported, by science” and that its hold over his peers is analogous to that of a “political or religious ideology”; John Searle tells us that “materialism is the religion of our time,” that “like more traditional religions, it is accepted without question and . . . provides the framework within which other questions can be posed, addressed, and answered,” and that “materialists are convinced, with a quasi-religious faith, that their view must be right”; and William Lycan admits, in what he himself calls “an uncharacteristic exercise in intellectual honesty,” that the arguments for materialism are no better than the arguments against it, that his “own faith in materialism is based on science-worship,” and that “we also always hold our opponents to higher standards of argumentation than we obey ourselves.”

One of the most famous admissions from a scientist about the war of worldviews comes from the materialist biologist Richard Lewontin.  Writing in a book review, Lewontin admits:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

All of this points to the need for the public conversation to include philosophy and worldviews.  The secularist who claims that science, in and of itself, disproves God has merely smuggled in atheism from the start.  Science, in and of itself, does not disprove God.  Only when it is built on a foundation of materialism can it do that kind of work.

Philosophy

Are You a Romantic?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

I don’t mean in the sense of displaying strong affection toward your spouse.  I mean in the sense of the nineteenth century movement of Romanticism.  I think the romantics still have something to say to us today, and I’m wondering how many of you can relate to their ideas.

According to William Lawhead, in his The Voyage of Discovery,  “Romanticism was a quasi-philosophical literary and artistic movement that reacted against the Enlightenment picture of the universe as a machine that could best be studied by the analytical techniques of the sciences.”

Lawhead expands on this theme:

For the romantics, the scientific vision of the world was too alienating, for it threatened to turn our moral, aesthetic, and religious longings into isolated aberrations within an otherwise mathematically ordered cosmos.  As the romantics looked out on nature, they did not see atomistic particles in motion.  Instead, they felt they were in the mystical presence of an organic unity that resonated with the human spirit. 

Furthermore, they were convinced that logic and telescopes missed what was most important about reality.  Rather than reason and science revealing the secrets of this world to us, they fragmented nature and turned it into a catalogue of abstractions.  In place of the banquet table of life, full of rich colors, tastes, and textures, science offered us only a cookbook of recipes. 

To be sure, every savory dish present at the banquet of nature was represented in the scientists’ recipes.  But to mistake the scientists’ calculations for the fullness of reality would lead to spiritual starvation.  The physicist could summarize the sunset and rainbow in optical equations, and the physiologist could describe the body of one’s lover as a machine made up of organic pumps, tubing, levers, and pulleys.  However, in each case the scientific account missed the beauty and the mystery of these realities.

Although I don’t agree with everything the Romantics had to say, there is much to be commended about their movement, and I find myself agreeing with several aspects of it.  It often seems to me that the battle of worldviews today is between the reductionists who want to explain every part of human experience in terms of scientific data and theory, and the modern romantics who see that human experience is so much more than what scientific data can explain.

Where do you stand?  Do you align yourself more with the reductionists or the romantics?  Why?

Morality, Philosophy, Polls, Top Ten Posts of 2011, Truth

Is Raping Little Children Just a Matter of Taste? – #2 Post of 2011

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Some statements about the world are objectively true, meaning they are true for all people, places, and times, regardless of whether anyone actually believes the statements.  Other statements about the world are subjective, meaning they merely refer to a person’s preferences or tastes.

An objective statement would be: “The sum of three plus five equals eight.”  This statement is not a matter of taste, but is an objective fact about the world.  It is true for all people at all times in all places that “the sum of three plus five equals eight.”

A subjective statement would be: “French roast is the worst tasting coffee.”  This statement is clearly a matter of taste, of my personal preference.  It gives information about me, not French roast coffee; you don’t learn anything objective about French Roast coffee from the statement.  It should also be clear that for all people at all times in all places, it is not true that French roast is the worst tasting coffee.

That brings me to my question.  Consider the following statement: “It is wrong to rape little children for fun.”  Is this statement objectively true or subjectively true?  Is the statement referring to a matter of fact about the moral wrongness of raping little children for fun, or is it expressing a personal taste or preference that I have against raping little children for fun, similar to the statement about French roast coffee?

Please answer this question in the poll below and be sure to leave comments explaining why you have answered the way you answered.

Philosophy, Top Ten Posts of 2011

What Is the Law of Non-Contradiction? – #3 Post of 2011

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

I am constantly amazed that there are people who try to deny the law of non-contradiction, which is the most basic principle of rational thought.  What is the law of non-contradiction?  There are at least three ways to state it:

  1. A thing cannot both be A and not-A at the same time and in the same sense.
  2. A thing cannot both exist and not exist at the same time and in the same sense.
  3. A statement cannot both be true and not true at the same time and in the same sense.

It is impossible to deny this law without invoking it in your denial, yet time and again I have heard people try do just that!

Why would I spend a blog post writing about this?  Because a person who thinks that this law is not true will become a thoroughly confused individual whose thought life is a complete mess, full of contradictions and inconsistencies.  I have met a few of these people, and they both sadden and scare me.

All of our beliefs, thoughts, and knowledge are built on top of the law of non-contradiction, so when a person tries to deny this foundation, they are bound to go way off track in their pursuit of understanding reality as it really is.

If you have any doubts about this fundamental law of rationality, try and deny it, but then write out your denial in a sentence – “The law of non-contradiction is false” – and ask whether your statement is both true and false at the same time and in the same sense.

If the law of non-contradiction is false, then your statement of denial must be both true and false.  But if your denial is false, then the law of non-contradiction is true!  By denying the law of non-contradiction, you have just affirmed it.  The more you try to deny the law, the more you will affirm it.

Trust me.  You cannot win.

Philosophy

Must We See to Believe?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Thomas, the disciple of Jesus, is famous for the following statement: “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.”

There have always been people like Thomas who demand that they directly experience something before they believe it exists.  During the Enlightenment in Europe, the philosophical theory of empiricism came to embody this principle for the modern world.

According to Garrett DeWeese, “the Enlightenment doctrine of empiricism holds that all knowledge of the world is empirical,” or all knowledge comes from our sensory experience.  The philosopher David Hume took this notion so far that he denied that we could know that our selves exist.

DeWeese continues:

Today the spectacular successes of the natural sciences have enshrined empirical investigation as by far the best – and for most people, the only – way to know.  But what about things we can’t sense?  Is nonempirical knowledge possible?  The question is crucial, for a great many important things can’t be known through our senses – things such as whether we have a soul and whether God exists.

If empiricism is true, then our knowledge becomes incredibly limited, and, in fact, the Romantics and German idealists that came after Hume and Kant were repelled by empiricism and rejected it as far too limiting of human knowledge.  Is empiricism true?

No.  Notice first that the claim “All knowledge of the world is empirical” is itself not an empirical statement.  How could we know that [claim] through our senses?  The claim is self-refuting.  But beyond that, there are good reasons to think that at least some knowledge of the world is nonempirical . . . .  Beliefs that certain things exist may be inferred from empirical observations.  This is how we justify belief in such things as electrons, gravitational fields, beauty, or love.  And similarly for belief in God.

DeWeese further explains:

We can know some things without using our senses at all.  For example, we can know much about ourselves through introspection (a nonempirical process).  We can know that we have minds that think, believe, hope, fear, and so on, and that we are not identical to our bodies.  Many ethicists claim that moral knowledge is accessible through intuition or conscience or pure reason.

Here is the bottom line.  Our senses serve us well, but they are limited.  We are more than our senses, and we can know more than what we directly experience with our senses.  Our lives would, in fact, be unlivable if we could only know what our senses directly bring to us. 

Unlivable?  Look at the words of David Hume, one of the most famous empiricists of modern history, speaking of his empiricist theories:

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium. . . . I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three of four hours of amusement, I wou’d return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.

Abortion, Philosophy

What Would Kant Say About Abortion?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Immanuel Kant is a famous philosopher who lived in the eighteenth century.  One of Kant’s most lasting contributions to philosophy was in the field of ethics.  He believed that moral laws could be derived from reason, and that all immoral behavior was, therefore, unreasonable or irrational.

Kant argued for the idea of the categorical imperative, a law of morality that all humans have a duty to obey.  His first formulation of this categorical imperative is the following: “Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”  Kant believed that all moral duties could be deduced from this categorical imperative.

What does this categorical imperative mean?  In essence, if you want to decide whether an act is morally good, then you should be able to will that everyone else would act in the same way.  In other words, the act must be universalizable.

What about abortion?  Kant would say to the woman who wants to have an abortion: “Can you will that every other woman would have an abortion when she is pregnant?”  If the woman says “yes,” then abortion is moral.  If she says “no,” then abortion cannot be moral.

It seems to me that a woman who wanted to have an abortion could not will that every other woman also have an abortion when she is pregnant.  Why?  Because in one generation the human race would go extinct and nobody could have an abortion.  To will that all women have abortions would mean that no women could have an abortion after the current generation died off.  By Kant’s reasoning, this makes abortion irrational and, therefore,  immoral.

Again, according to Kant, abortion would be immoral because it would be irrational to will that every pregnant woman have an abortion.  The act of every pregnant woman aborting the fetus inside her would, ultimately, end abortion, which is completely irrational.

You may not agree with Kant’s categorical imperative, but it does give us an interesting perspective on the issue of abortion.  Fundamentally, those who support a woman’s choice to have an abortion can only support some women choosing abortion, not all.  Presumably and ironically, if all women decided to have abortions, the pro-choice movement would have to become pro-life.

Philosophy

Where are the Kantian Agnostics?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

I’ve been reading the famous eighteenth century philosopher Immanuel Kant lately.  Kant’s theory of knowledge only allowed for human knowledge to extend to those things we can directly experience through our senses.  Kant argued that we could not have direct experience of our self, the cosmos, or God.

Kant’s empiricism ruled out rational knowledge of these three things, so he argued that we must remain agnostic about their existence.  He also argued that for practical reasons, most of us believe that the self exists, that the whole universe (cosmos) exists, and that God exists, but these are positions of faith, not rational knowledge.

Kant’s agnosticism was a turning point in the history of epistemology (the study of knowledge).  What I find interesting is that his brand of agnosticism seems to have fallen by the wayside.

Why do I say this?  Kant argued that since the self, God, and the cosmos cannot be experienced by our senses, we cannot, in principle, make any rational statements about their existence or non-existence.  We just don’t know one way or another.  Kant believed that people who argued that God does not exist are just as foolish as people who argue that God does exist.  Both positions are rationally unprovable.

Most people who call themselves agnostic today don’t seem to hold Kant’s views any longer.  When I meet someone who says they are agnostic, they generally mean something like the following: “I haven’t seen enough evidence to know if God exists.”

The modern agnostic implicitly believes that one can have evidence of God’s existence, and thus rational knowledge of God’s existence, whereas Kant denies that there is ever any chance of there being evidence one way or another.

What is going on?  It seems to me that there are generally two kinds of agnostics today.  The first kind really is undecided on God’s existence and is waiting to hear evidence.  Given that evidence, they may come to decide that God exists.

The second kind of agnostic really believes that all the available evidence is stacked against God’s existence, but they don’t want to call themselves an atheist; maybe the “atheist” label seems too dogmatic.  In everything but name, however, they are an atheist – they know God does not exist.

Kant would think both of these kinds of agnostics are equally wrongheaded.  But where are the Kantian agnostics today?  Are there any left?  Are there any agnostics who truly believe that knowledge of God is impossible and that we must remain forever on the fence about it?  Do these same agnostics believe the same thing about the self and the cosmos?

Just wondering . . .