Philosopher of Religion on Theism and Explanation - Interview

On faith and reason, he says,

...while the arguments put forward by many Christian philosophers are serious arguments, there is something less than serious about the spirit in which they are being offered. There is a direction in which those arguments will not be permitted to go. Arguments that support the faith will be seriously entertained; those that apparently undermine the faith must be countered, at any cost. Philosophy, to use the traditional phrase, is merely a “handmaid” of theology. There is, to my mind, something frivolous about a philosophy of this sort. My feeling is that if we do philosophy, it ought to be because we take arguments seriously. This means following them wherever they lead. This may sound naïve. There are moral commitments, for instance, that few of us would be prepared to abandon, even if we lacked good arguments in their support. But if the followers of Hume are right, there is a close connection between our moral beliefs and our moral sentiments that would justify this attitude. In any case, even in matters of morality, we should not be maintaining positions that have lots of arguments against them and few in their favour, just because we have made a commitment to do so.

I doubt that many philosophers of religion think that there are lots of good arguments against theism and few considerations in its favor. Some of them may think that rational arguments aren't the basis of their belief in God, but that's different than thinking that all the evidence points away from their beliefs. Lots of philosophy students read Berkeley's arguments for idealism at some point, and almost no one becomes an idealist, and that's even if they don't exactly know what's wrong with his arguments. The fact that they still think there are material objects is not some sort of betrayal of philosophy or whatever. Why couldn't a similar thing be true of some belief in God? In fact, the view of "reformed epistemology" in contemporary phil of religion argues something like that.

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