Abstract
Discussion of the role which religious experience can play in warranting theistic belief has received a great deal of attention within contemporary philosophy of religion. By contrast, the relationship between experience and atheistic belief has received relatively little focus. Our aim in this paper is to begin to remedy that neglect. In particular, we focus on the hitherto under-discussed question of whether experiences of God’s absence can provide positive epistemic status for a belief in God’s nonexistence. We argue that there is good reason to accept an epistemic parity between experiences of God’s presence and experiences of God’s absence
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Notes
We consider one reason for denying this in “Evaluating the new approach” below, but since this reason entails denying Martin’s conditional claim, it cannot be deployed in defence of his argument.
We will talk in what follows as if absences can serve as genuine causal relata but our account is compatible with rejecting this view in favour of one in which they are merely able to feature in true causal explanations (in Beebee’s (2004, p. 293) sense).
Rea himself merely reports this claim without endorsing it.
This is not, of course, to claim that we might not have other reasons to disregard their testimony (perhaps the sailors in question have a penchant for rum or a history of making up tales of fantastical creatures).
See Chap. 5.3 of Reid (1764/2011).
Plantinga doesn’t call the relevant circumstances ‘signs’, but we will use this term to include both Evans-style TNSs and the stimuli which Plantinga claims may trigger the sensus divinitatis.
See, e.g., Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus for one famous example.
Strictly speaking, the universe itself—considered as a spatiotemporal object—would be indifferent, but, given the dictates of divine providence it would not function in an indifferent manner.
Technically, the counterfactual link here is not with the non-existence of the God of classical theism in particular, but with the non-existence of any kind of supernatural being capable of, e.g., enforcing order on the universe. We will, however, ignore this complication in what follows.
While these accounts are explicitly formulated in terms of information and signalling respectively, the insights they offer can easily be incorporated into an account of signs.
Indeed, most contemporary accounts of the nature of function make no appeal to intentions (see Millikan (1998) for an extremely influential account of this kind).
By which we mean merely that they successfully function so as to produce true belief. Again, see Millikan (1998) for an account of this kind.
Indeed Evans himself makes this kind of suggestion when he says ‘an atheistic Reidian would presumably have to see the link between the sign and what is signified in perception as non-accidental, perhaps seeing the link as one that has some functional value that has provided an evolutionary edge.’ (2010, p. 36).
See, e.g., Murray (1993).
We would like to thank the audience at the University of Nottingham workshop on religious experience, an anonymous referee for the journal, and a different token of one of this paper's authors for their useful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Adams, S., Robson, J. Does absence make atheistic belief grow stronger?. Int J Philos Relig 79, 49–68 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-015-9532-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-015-9532-3