A Shot of Faith to the Head

Evidentialism is Quite Dead

We have just picked up a copy of Mitch Stokes's A Shot of Faith {To the Head}(Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012) which is a well written, very approachable piece of work on the intellectual battle against the Christian faith being waged at a neighbourhood near you.

The work makes the philosophical contributions of men like Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff accessible and useful to the wider Christian community.  (For their part, Plantinga and Wolterstorff have, in turn, been making Scottish philosopher, Thomas Reid accessible to modern readers.)

Here is an initial excerpt:

During the Enlightenment, then, reason became the key arbiter, judging even religious beliefs.  From this time on, says Nicholas Wolterstorff, a believer must hold "his religious convictions on the basis of other beliefs of his which give to those convictions adequate evidential support."  Like any belief, belief in God must be supported by sufficient evidence.  In fact, this requirement applied to all beliefs and was the Enlightenment's standard for rationality:

To be rational, a belief must be supported by sufficient evidence.

This standard is important enough to be named--it's the same standard of today's atheists.  Let's call it evidentialism.  

Now is as good a time as any to point out that, so far, we really have only a "gut feeling" for what counts as evidence.  To be sure, we know that evidentialism requires that all beliefs be supported by evidence, whatever evidence turns out to be.  But with no clear criterion for what counts as evidence, we can't actually determine whether a belief has any.  We'll find out that nearly everything of substance hinges on this.  (Ibid., p.4f.)

But, of course, evidentialism is itself skewered by what we refer to as the Cretan paradox.   If evidentialism is true, then everything is irrational, including evidentialism itself.  As Stokes says:

After all, if evidentialism is true, and all beliefs require evidence, then the evidentialist's belief that evidentialism is true is ultimately irrational.  Evidentialism itself is ultimately unsupported and therefore self-defeating.

Notice too--and this gets us back to our pressing issue--that any atheist who is also an evidentialist is irrational in believing that belief in God is irrational.  After all, her belief that belief in God is irrational is itself a belief.  Yet because this belief is obviously part of her irrational belief structure, it too is irrational.  . . . Evidentialism is quite dead.  (Ibid., p.16f)