William Lane Craig Responds to Rationality Rules!
Rationality Rules takes issue with some of Dr. Craig's comments on epistemic standards, and Dr. Craig responds!
STEPHEN: And because it's worth believing, because it makes him feel warm and fuzzy, because it satisfies his selfish desire of living forever, he's lowered his epistemic standard to the damn floor.
DR. CRAIG: Far from raising the bar or the epistemic standard that Christianity must meet to be believed, I lower it.
STEPHEN: I'm not going to polish this turd. It doesn't deserve it. What the actual f---. This is Ray Comfort level nonsense coming from the mouth of perhaps the most revered and respected theist of our time. Sweet zombie Jesus what the...
CAMERON BERTUZZI: Right, so . . .
DR. CRAIG: [chuckles]
CAMERON BERTUZZI: Let's go ahead and get your comments on . . . because really what he was doing, he was expressing some incredulity about what you said.
DR. CRAIG: Yeah, and I think that Stephen's incredulity is borne out of a lack of understanding. Epistemologists distinguish between pragmatic justification and epistemic justification. Epistemic justification seeks for truth-directed reasons for holding some belief; that is to say, it seeks to provide reasons to think that the belief is true. Pragmatic justification seeks for non-truth-directed reasons for believing something to be true. And in doing pragmatic justification, what one basically does is a kind of cost-benefit analysis. One assesses the costs associated with having this belief with the benefits associated with having this belief, and if the benefits significantly outweigh the costs, then you can be pragmatically justified in holding that belief. So this is not a matter, as Stephen suggests, of what makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, nor is it a matter of selfishness and narcissism. It's just simply doing a kind of cost-benefit analysis of the belief in question. And the very interesting thing Cameron, as you know, is that sometimes epistemic justification and pragmatic justification can come apart, and pragmatic justification might lead you to raise the standards for believing some proposition to be true, or it might lower the standards for believing some proposition to be true.
CAMERON BERTUZZI: Are you talking about pragmatic encroachment here?
DR. CRAIG: Yes, that's one word for it. One name for it is that the pragmatic can encroach on the epistemic. So to give an example that's frequent in the literature. Imagine you're diagnosed with stage four cancer, and you have only a short time to live. Epistemically you would not be justified in believing that you're going to survive. But suppose you're also told that cancer patients who believe that they're going to make it, who believe that they're going to survive, have a better rate of survival than those who do not, and the reason is because this optimistic, upbeat attitude is health-conducive. So if you believe that you're going to make it, you will actually increase your chances of survival. Now what are you going to do seriously in a situation like that? Are you going to only believe what is epistemically justified, namely that you're going to die? If so, then you have doomed yourself. Or, are you going to pluck up your courage and believe, if you can, that you are going to make it, thereby increasing your chances of survival? This would be an example of where something might be pragmatically justified for you to believe, even though it wouldn't be epistemically justified. And one can give examples working in the opposite direction as well where you might be more skeptical of something you're epistemically justified in believing because it would have terrible costs associated with it. So basically one does a cost-benefit analysis. The point that I was making is that whatever you might think of the epistemic status of Christianity . . . and I think you know, Cameron, that I think it's extremely well-justified. I don't think there's any other contemporary philosopher who has done more to offer arguments for the existence of God and evidences of Christianity than I have. So even though I think it's epistemic status is very, very high, nevertheless I also think that one can be pragmatically justified in believing in Christianity through a cost-benefit analysis of the great benefit to be promised if it's true as opposed to the costs that would be exacted from you if it turns out to be false. And when you do that I think that it is clear that belief in Christianity is pragmatically justified, whatever you might think about its epistemic status. And that was the point that occurred to me as a high schooler.
CAMERON BERTUZZI: I also wanted to just highlight the fact that pragmatic encroachment . . . did you really talk about that? Because you said . . . basically you made the distinction between epistemic status and pragmatic status of a belief, but encroachment is when pragmatic concerns can raise or lower the epistemic standard of some belief in question. And so some philosophers think that actually pragmatic concerns can do this; they can raise or lower the bar of the epistemic warrant or justification that's required for some belief to be epistemically justified. Now one thing I think that we should note here is that pragmatic encroachment is very controversial. It's a controversial view in philosophy, but that is not to say that it makes one a narcissist – that if you believe in pragmatic encroachment that you're a narcissist or you're some kind of buffoon, or . . .
DR. CRAIG: Or you’re irrational.
CAMERON BERTUZZI: Right. This is a philosophically defensible view that philosophers have defended in the literature, and it's not as if this is just something that Dr. Craig has made up or it is just because he just wishes that it's true and “that's the reason why his entire apologetic case just completely falls apart because he believes in a pragmatic encroachment,” which I don't even know if you even believe in pragmatic encroachment. Maybe you can clarify here.
DR. CRAIG: No, I'm not necessarily endorsing it. It could very well be that one's epistemic justification for a belief is not affected by these pragmatic considerations, but nevertheless these pragmatic arguments give independent reasons for holding the belief in question, like that you're going to survive cancer.