Consider this fairly standard version of the argument from hiddenness:
If God exists, he produces everything that is necessary for a personal relationship with every nonresisting person.
Belief in the existence of x is necessary for a personal relationship with x.
So, if God exists, every nonresisting person comes to believe in God.
Some nonresisting person does not come to believe in God.
So, God does not exist.
I noticed today that (2) is just plain false. My example is a skeptic about other minds. You can take seriously the hypothesis that you are the only real person around, seriously enough that you do not believe the hypothesis false, and still have a personal relationship with other people. Surely Unger, in his phase of believing that people don’t exist, had personal relationships with them!
A perhaps even better counterexample to (2) was given by one of my students. You can have a long-standing Internet-based personal relationship while taking seriously the possibility that the other person doesn’t exist (e.g., maybe you are interacting with a chatbot).
This observation doesn’t destroy the hiddenness argument. One might, for instance, replace (2) with:
- A personal relationship with x is incompatible with consistent disbelief in the existence of x
and then replace (4) with:
- Some nonresisting persons end up consistently disbelieving in God (e.g., due to their reasonable evaluation of the problem of evil, or due to low priors for theism).
But now (7) is less plausible than (4). One might well think that the evidence against theism is insufficiently strong to make it possible for a nonresister to disbelieve in God.
Alternately, one might replace the deductive hiddenness argument with a probabilistic one by noting that it’s a lot harder to have a personal relationship without belief in the other person, and it’s unlikely that a loving God would make it this hard. I think that’s not a very strong argument, but it is an option for the defender of hiddenness.
Alex
ReplyDeleteThe relationship you may have with other persons that you think might not exist is completely different from relationships with people you are convinced they exist.
You can only have a real personal relationship with a real person. You can have all kinds of relationships, even with an imagined friend. But those relaionships are not real and they are certainly not personal. Personal relationships involve a lot more than internet-based relationships with a chatbot. Otherwise, the ralionship your student has with a chatbot should continue to be personal even after he has found out it was really a chatbot he was having a conversation with.
"The relationship you may have with other persons that you think might not exist is completely different from relationships with people you are convinced they exist."
ReplyDeleteThat's an empirical question. I don't know much about Unger's personal life, but it would not be surprising if during his phase of denying the existence of persons he still had a number of interpersonal relationships.
Then think about your own relationships with people close to you. Now imagine that you became significantly less confident of their existence, because maybe you started taking more seriously the hypothesis that you are a brain in a vat. (Maybe you have some odd experiences you don't have a good explanation of other than digital glitching of a brain-in-a-vat system.) Would that worry necessarily make you love those close to you less? You would, of course, become anxious that the people you centered your life on aren't real, but if anything that prospect could make you cherish them more! And at least as long as you still thought it to be a little more likely than not that they are real, it would be very reasonable to resolve to live as if they were real. And if you did that, and if it turned out that the people you related to ARE real, then surely it would be correct to say that you continued to have interpersonal relatinships with them.
I think the point is particularly clear when the doubt is temporary. You get the flu and wake up with a very foggy mind. You start wondering whether you _have_ woken up, or whether you are just having a very vivid dream with fake memories. You interact with people as usual, but for several hours you are undecided whether this is a dream. Then your mind clears. Didn't you have personal relationships during those hours of undecision?
As for chatbots and the like, many people over history have had deeply meaningful personal relationships largely or wholly mediated by correspondence. (I know someone who spends a lot of time corresponding with political prisoners in an oppressive regime.) Now, you may yourself doubt that ChatGPT can fake the kind of correspondence that mediates a personal relationship, and you may well be right about that. But now imagine that the person who has a meaningful personal relationship mediated by electronic correspondence is misinformed to the effect that (a) current AI is capable of faking such correspondence and (b) cases of such fakes by chatbots are in fact common. As a result, their confidence that they are corresponding with a real person goes down to 60% (which is insufficient for belief), but they continue the relationship, with some anxiety superadded. This seems quite imaginable, and the relationship remains personal.
Would that worry make you love those close to you less?
ReplyDeleteYes. The more doubt, the less love.
Why do you think the probabilistic argument from divine hiddenness is not very strong?
ReplyDeleteMy guess is that Alex thinks it is likely that a loving God will make it hard to have a personal relation with Him.
ReplyDelete