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    Carmelics

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    If our epistemic position relative to divine reasons rese... — Carmelics
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    Challenges→The above argument appears to stand or fall with the defensibility of the inductive inference from (1) to (2).

    If our epistemic position relative to divine reasons resembles a child's inability to grasp a surgeon's justification for causing pain, then the absence of perceived justifying reasons carries negligible evidential weight.

    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    1 reason for
    1 reason against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Epistemic humility is warranted when cognitive gaps between agents are vast; children genuinely cannot evaluate surgical justifications.
      ?

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    • 2.Absence of perceived justification ≠ absence of actual justification; the gap itself suggests our inability to access divine reasoning.
      ?

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    • 3.If God's reasons operate at a fundamentally different logical level, our failure to perceive them is predictable and uninformative.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.The analogy fails: children can eventually understand surgery, but we have no evidence we could ever comprehend divine reasons, even in principle.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 2.Invoking cognitive gaps to dismiss all negative evidence makes the claim unfalsifiable and immunizes it from rational evaluation.
      ?

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    • 3.If we cannot assess divine justifications even hypothetically, the claim provides no grounds to distinguish a benevolent God from an indifferent one.
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    Key Terms

    Divine reasons(in philosophy of religion)
    The justifications or explanations that God (or a divine being) might have for doing something, which could be beyond human understanding.
    Evidential weight(in discussions about justification and reasoning)
    How much a piece of evidence should count toward proving or disproving something—whether it's strong proof or weak proof.
    Problem of evil (implied context)(as the underlying problem this statement addresses)
    A philosophical question asking: if God is all-powerful and all-good, why does suffering and evil exist in the world?
    epistemic position(as used in epistemology)
    Someone's current state of knowledge or what information they have access to in a particular situation.
    epistemology(Contrasted with purely descriptive scientific inquiry)
    A normative enterprise that tells us how we ought to reason from evidence and how we ought to justify our beliefs, as distinct from merely describing how we do reason or justify beliefs

    Connections

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    Problem of Evil1 linked

    Related

    Absence of perceived justification ≠ absence of actual justification; the gap it...Epistemic humility is warranted when cognitive gaps between agents are vast; chi...If God's reasons operate at a fundamentally different logical level, our failure...If we cannot assess divine justifications even hypothetically, the claim provide...
    +3 moreShow less
    Invoking cognitive gaps to dismiss all negative evidence makes the claim unfalsi...The above argument appears to stand or fall with the defensibility of the induct...

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    2 (1 for, 1 against)
    Edits
    1 edit
    The analogy fails: children can eventually understand surgery, but we have no ev...