Faith, Evidence, and Intellectual Honesty: A Reply to Loftus

This concerns the famous, or infamous Bill Craig claim that the witness of the Holy Spirit provides such a powerful warrant for his belief in Christianity that he would keep believing even if his assessment of all the objective arguments were to turn negatve. I wrote on a thread on debunking Christianity:


VR: OK, here's one from me. Bill has done a lot of good work, but he's shooting himself in the foot with this response.

John W. Loftus said...

Agreed Vic, but what do you make of an earlier question of mine that Bill answered right here with regard to Lessing's Ugly Broad Ditch that historical proofs cannot lead the believer to faith?



Am I wrong to think that Bill is impaled on the horns of a huge dilemma? On the one hand historical evidence cannot lead him to faith, yet on the other hand the inner witness of the Spirit leads him to say what he did here?

VR: Well, I think you are setting up a false dilemma here. I would personally have a lot of trouble continuing to believe based on some inner voice if I really thought the objective evidence for theism or Christianity were bad. But, I believe that part of what the Holy Spirit does in my life is acquaint me with objective reasons as well as subjective feelings. We come to intellectual discussion of the reasons to believe with a set of intellectual predispositions, or what Bayesians call "priors." I don't think you can legislate priors, or require that we retreat from our existing belief system to some neutral position and go from there. It didn't really work for Descartes, so why should it work for me? And none of us is intellectually pure, in that, emotional reasons are always going to be present no matter what we believe, so long as we care about what we believe. What we have to do is our due diligence with respect to the reasons on both sides of the question, and combine that with a trust that God will give us our "daily bread," the means by which to remain faithful to Christ and intellectually honest at the same time. (The intellectual self-canonization of at least some unbelievers, but also of some Christians as well, is an annoying characteristic). For nearly 38 years, God has not disappointed me.