: Piper: Come now that is hardly fair. It is a basis for belief because (inter alia) it is universally accepted by christians as containing the word of god. Come on, matey, we've been across this stuff before.
Why is it accepted as containing the Word of God? - because it says it does; something that can equally well be said of any holy book in the world.
Piper: No, it is accepted as containing the word of god because christians have faith in the truth of this.
Gideon: The question is whether the Bible can be used to provide 'reliable witness' for metaphysical phenomena; I don't think that the Bible can produce independent evidence to back up its version of events.
Piper: Is it? Only if you want to use the bible as a historical proof. This is not necessary to ground the belief system of a christian.
Gideon: As you and I know, the Bible was written as a series of books; what we know of as 'the Bible' today is the sum total of various different (and occasionally conflicting) holy texts. In all cases, the writer was human; the only 'divine source' of the Bible is in the perceptions of the people who wrote it.
Piper: So the faith of christians is that theese people were in some sense divinely inspired.
Gideon: Alston's doxastic practice is flaky and unsound in my opinion (as I've pointed out at length elsewhere); he has not given any substantiable reason to believe that 'perception of God' is in any qualitative wise different from a wet dream; I remain unconvinced that the mortal can ever have any meaningful perception of 'God' in an infinite and unchanging form.
Piper: Ok. Stepping back...
Gideon: Self-evidence is entirely subjective; you could perfectly well take the existence of giant purple mushrooms to be self-evident; but it's not in any way substantiable or verifiable.
The a priori assumptions on which science and logic are founded are still assumptions, but they are subject to experimental testing. Even if an experiment cannot provide you with the ultimate confirmation of a theory, it can falsify it (unless you hold to the Quine-Duhem Thesis).
Piper: We cannot 'prove' the principles of induction and deduction, they are self evident rules. (just like we cannot 'prove' experience).
Gideon: Anything held to be a 'rule' needs to be substantiable in some way; you need some criteria by which you can test the objective truth of a proposition.
Piper: You seem to be sailing very close to a verification theory of truth gideon- remember it was you who said I was a logical positivist. You also seem to have thrown necessity out the window.
Law consists of 'rules'. To what test of objecive truth can these rules be put?
Sorry gideon, i really cannot bring myself to write a defense of alston. I have no patience for those who try to build abstract metaphysical systems...
But a few general comments. I don't see how you can necessarily draw a distinction between everyday experience and mystical experience. Many of the things we experience in our everyday lives are just as fuzzy as a mystical experience.
Second the existence of god is a logical possibility. So it is possible that there is a god and that people have direct experience of it. You do not seem willing to admit this gideon, possessed as you are with an almost religous secularism....
The facts of the matter are that there are those that claim experience of god. There are also those who claim to have been abducted and raped by aliens, to have eaten deep fried chicken with elvis in 1992, to have been cleopatra in a previos incarnation.
Now which of these claims are true? We can discount them on common sense. We can say 'well, i *know* that elvis died in 1979, so he couldn't have been munching on a chicken wing in KFC in 1992'.
No doubt common sense tells us that god does not exist. That the bible was written by a bunch of dubiously inspired fanatics. But religion is not about common sense. It is about faith. Faith is not burdened by the requirements of probability or possibility. Kierkegaard said in his Journals:
"faith is not an intellectual but an ethical category, signifying the personal relationship between God and man. That is why faith is required (as an expression of devotion), believing against reason, believing although one cannot see."
None.
