| | Liebniz wrote, You keep creating a false dichotomy. It is possible to accept God's existence on faith and view the idea as rationally defensible. Faith, in this case, describes an assent to an objective uncertainty, not an objective improbability.
Arguments for God's existence attempt to prove the existence of God. In my view, insofar as such arguments purport to prove God's existence, they're untenable; however, I think that the arguments taken together, in an inductive sense, form a large-scale collection of probabilistic evidence for God's existence. As Kira, the heroine of We The Living said, "If you write a whole line of zeroes, it's still nothing." A collection of bad arguments does not add up to a good one. If I concoct a multitude of fallacious arguments that you are guilty of murder, could I then argue that, due to their sheer volume, they constitute probabilistic evidence of your guilt? I don't think so.
You stated earlier that "No one believes in God (I hope) based on arguments for his existence." Yet, you now say that these arguments do constitute a sound basis for that belief. Why would you then say that you hope no one believes in God based on arguments for his existence? Doesn't that imply that you don't regard them as a sound basis for that belief?
More importantly, you seem to be confusing a bad argument with insufficient evidence. A bad argument is no evidence at all. To be sure, it is possible that in a murder case, there is some evidence pointing to the accused, but not enough to justify a conviction. Let's say that witnesses place the accused at the scene of the crime, that articles of his clothing are found there along with his finger prints and samples of his blood, that the victim's blood is found on his clothes, and that he is caught trying to dispose of the incriminating evidence. The fact that witnesses place him at the scene of the crime would not by itself be sufficient to convict him, but together with all the other evidence, it is. But this is true, because each of these individual facts does qualify as actual evidence. A fallacious argument, on the other hand, does not. When I earlier wrote that many people believe in God because "that's just the way they see it," my point was that belief in God draws from, at bottom, innumerable and often inaccessible experiences, evidences, judgments, inclinations, dispositions, evaluations, partialities, etc. This is not to say that belief in God is irrational, but rather that it more often than not arises from a person involuntarily. This is beside the point. The issue here is whether the belief can be justified or must be accepted on faith -- i.e., without adequate justification, which is what "faith" means in this context. Judgments, inclinations, dispositions and evaluations can serve as the reasons for someone's belief. The question is: are those reasons good ones? From what I can tell, you don't have an adequate justification for your belief in God, and are claiming, in so many words, that it must be accepted on faith. You have abdicated reason in the very act of claiming to preserve it.
- Bill
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