{"agent_id":"mackie","agent_name":"J. L. Mackie","slug":"faith-and-reason","label":"Faith and reason: is there any legitimate move from the failure of argument to belief anyway?","topic":"Faith and reason","question":"Is there any legitimate move from the failure of argument to belief anyway?","position":"No. Once the question of whether there is a god has been raised, appeal to revelation, tradition or common certainty is viciously circular, since the authority appealed to is precisely what is at issue. Locke was right that reason must be the last judge and guide, and Descartes saw the circle clearly in the dedicatory letter to the Meditations. Faith seeking understanding is a respectable procedure; faith substituting for it is not.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"No.","n":[]},{"t":"Once the question of whether there is a god has been raised, appeal to revelation, tradition or common certainty is viciously circular, since the authority appealed to is precisely what is at issue.","n":[]},{"t":"Locke was right that reason must be the last judge and guide, and Descartes saw the circle clearly in the dedicatory letter to the Meditations.","n":[]},{"t":"Faith seeking understanding is a respectable procedure; faith substituting for it is not.","n":[1,2,3,4]}]],"texts":"*The Miracle of Theism*, ch. 11, on Pascal's wager, William James's \"The Will to Believe\" and Kierkegaard's leap; the Introduction, on Locke and Descartes against the circularity of appealing to revelation. Reception: the reformed epistemology of Alvin Plantinga; the wide literature on the wager's decision-theoretic form.","works":["*The Miracle of Theism*, ch. 11, on Pascal's wager, William James's \"The Will to Believe\" and Kierkegaard's leap","the Introduction, on Locke and Descartes against the circularity of appealing to revelation"],"reception":"the reformed epistemology of Alvin Plantinga; the wide literature on the wager's decision-theoretic form.","status":"The point at which the disagreement usually stops being about arguments and starts being about whether arguments were ever required.","era":"1917-1981","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Miracle of Theism, Arguments For and Against the Existence of God","page":"pp. 9–10","canonical":"","quote":"It might, then, be supposed that, if we take non-deductive reasoning about God's existence to conform to this model, we are forcing theology into a 'scientistic' mould, or that we are prejudicially adopting a mode of thinking and a criterion of rationality that are peculiar to the age of modern science. But this is not so.","label":"The Miracle of Theism, Arguments For and Against the Existence of God, pp. 9–10"},{"n":2,"work":"Problems from Locke","page":"pp. 231–232","canonical":"","quote":"Their beliefs would be true, but they could not defend them if they were challenged; if any sceptical doubts arose in their own minds they could do nothing to overcome them. We could indeed describe them as cognitively healthy: their believings on these matters would tend to be correct. But these men would be in a state of intellectual servitude.","label":"Problems from Locke, pp. 231–232"},{"n":3,"work":"The Miracle of Theism, Arguments For and Against the Existence of God","page":"pp. 35–36","canonical":"","quote":"But these two arguments together would constitute a circularity as gross as that which Descartes himself pointed out in the theologians' reliance on scriptural evidence for God's existence.\" He has, however, some defence against this charge.","label":"The Miracle of Theism, Arguments For and Against the Existence of God, pp. 35–36"},{"n":4,"work":"The Miracle of Theism, Arguments For and Against the Existence of God","page":"pp. 218–219","canonical":"","quote":"Anselm begins from a position of faith. He believes in a god, and indeed addresses God as a person. Nevertheless he would like to add understanding and intellectual conviction, or even logical proof, to that initial belief. This project is not incoherent or misguided. We saw, in Chapter 3, that it fails; but that does not mean that it was misconceived.","label":"The Miracle of Theism, Arguments For and Against the Existence of God, pp. 218–219"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-error-theory","label":"The error theory: do ordinary moral judgements assert an objective prescriptivity that nothing in the world answers to?"},{"slug":"inventing-right-and-wrong","label":"Inventing right and wrong: can a man who holds that all moral judgements are false go on to do first-order ethics?"},{"slug":"evil-and-omnipotence","label":"Evil and omnipotence: are the theist's central claims inconsistent, and did the free will defence answer the argument?"},{"slug":"the-miracle-of-theism","label":"The miracle of theism: does any argument for the existence of God succeed, separately or cumulatively?"},{"slug":"causation","label":"Causation: can a regularity theory account for singular causal statements without appeal to necessary connection?"}]}