Abstract: This essay defends the theological agnostic’s view that one ought to withhold judgment concerning God’s existence, by offering a justification for that belief. A distinction is made between a strong agnostic, who believes it is impossible to know that God exists, and a weak agnostic, who just takes it to be a contingent fact about herself that she does not know whether or not God exists. The concept of God being used in this paper is that expressed by J.N. Findlay and Alvin Plantinga, who understand God as possessing its various qualities in some necessary manner. The paper proceeds by constructing an antinomy, according to which it follows from innocuous assertions both that God does exist and that God does not exist. Two distinct arguments are offered, with one deriving the existence of God, and the other deriving the nonexistence of God. Having described both arguments, the agnostic appeals to the Pyrrhonistic epistemic principle which says that if a proposition is counterbalanced, then with regard to that proposition one ought to withhold belief. The innocuous premise in the proof of God’s nonexistence is: that man has landed on the moon does not logically imply that God exists. The corresponding innocuous premise in the proof of God’s existence is: that God exists does not logically imply that man has landed on Uranus. These two premises are combined with the following two propositions that are used to capture the necessitarian concept of God, viz. (1) If God exists then it is necessarily true that God exists, and (2) If God does not exist then it is necessarily true that God does not exist. The concept of entailment employed is the likes of C.I. Lewis’s strict implication. The gist of this essay is the notion that if it is possible to prove both that God exists and prove that God does not exist by strictly analogous derivations, then the Pyrrhonistic counter-balancing has been achieved, which leaves the agnostic withholding judgment about whether or not God exists.
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-10-11
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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