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A RESPONSE TO THE ARGUMENT FROM THE REASONABLENESS OF NONBELIEF

2004; Society of Christian Philosophers; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5840/faithphil20042122

2153-3393

Robert T. Lehe,

Free Will and Agency

sufficient grounds for belief, and that since there are people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves without sufficient grounds for belief, it must be concluded that God does not exist.This argument is formally valid, but two of the premises are controversial.Theists will generally not object to the first premise, but premises 2 and 3 can be challenged.Although Schellenberg vigorously defends those two premises, I will argue that his defense of neither of them is successful.Schellenberg's defense of premise 2 is based principally on the thought that if a perfectly good God exists, it would be a great benefit, morally and spiritually, for any person who is capable of it, to believe that God exists.Belief that God exists is a precondition of the possibility of salvation and of the benefits of the spiritual and moral transformation that theists in general, and Christians especially, associate with conversion.If God is perfectly loving, he would not, for any length of time, withhold these benefits from anyone who is capable of receiving them.Of course, if out of stubbornness, selfishness, or some other sinful motive, persons refuse to submit to the evidence for God's existence that God makes available to them, God will not force them to believe.A loving God would not present himself so forcefully and emphatically that the freedom to accept or reject God is overwhelmed.A loving God would respect the freedom of the individual to respond, or not, to God's overtures.However, a loving God would not make the evidence of his existence so ambiguous and inconclusive as to make it possible for intellectually honest, open-minded seekers to remain in doubt.A loving God would not allow anyone to remain, for any length of time, in a condition of reasonable, inculpable nonbelief.Schellenberg devotes a chapter to the defense of premise 3, the proposition that reasonable nonbelief exists in the actual world.Schellenberg distinguishes disbelief, the belief that God does not exist, from nonbelief, the view that there is epistemic parity between the proposition that God does exist and the proposition that God does not exist.Reasonable nonbelief is characterized as "any instance of the failure to believe in the existence of God that is not the result of culpable actions or omissions on the part of the subject." 3 For some people, doubt "arises through no fault of their own and so they are not in any sense to blame for it." 4Premises 2 and 3 are formulated in terms of reasonable nonbelief, but in the elaboration and defense of them, Schellenberg essentially equates reasonable nonbelief with inculpable nonbelief.Therefore, doubt is sometimes inculpable.The philosophical arguments for the existence of God are controversial, so it is possible for someone, after carefully examining them, to reasonably conclude that they do not establish the existence of God.The kind of religious experience that many believers claim to have is unavailable to nonbelievers, in spite of their openness to God.Schellenberg cites the fact that there are people who want to believe and who honestly search for God, but who come up empty.And there are numerous Christian theologians and philosophers who admit that the world is "religiously ambiguous" and claim that divine hiddenness is consistent with God's way of drawing people to faith.So Schellenberg finds support for 3 in the fact that even many Christians accept it. 5hile it is true that some Christians accept the claim that inculpable non-