[Sternwallow]

sethhersch wrote

Thanks for all the great replies.



As for the giraffe case: excellent question. If a premonition shares important and relevant characteristics with a sort of daydream, then it oughtn't to be grounds for any sort of basic belief. It was not the sort of supernatural, GOD spoke to me crap that you often hear. I didn't feel drawn to the light of GOD, or any such nonsense. At the time, I was a non-believer for the most part, so it would be quite a trick for me to suddenly have a vision in regards to a being the existence of which was at least questionable; that boarders terrible mental health. No, the "premonition" was more like my snapping into connection with an intuition that something about theism would end up making sense if I did enough fact gathering. I call it a premonition and not an intuition mostly because it caught me off-guard. I am a doxastic foundationalist, as I have mentioned, and I regard that certain innate, basic beliefs exist which are utterly indubitable -- that is, merely in virtue of my having them they are true. This is pretty closely akin to Swinburne's account of epistemic architecture. Another interesting feature of these innate ideas is that I don't think that I am at once aware of all of them, as Leibniz thought. I think Descartes's dispositional account more accurately reflects what is at work here: I have innate ideas that I can come to know given the right circumstance, propositional attitudes, etc. This is why it's at least very unlikely that I could have an innate idea that I am actually a giraffe waiting for me to be in the right place epistemically to discover this fact. It sounds absurd because it is. I shall do my best to illustrate over time why I think that a particular kind of theism, when combined with doxastic foundationalism, is disanalogous to this and so does not share the same affliction.



Thanks so much for the warm welcome, and I look forward to being challenged. I appreciate the intillectual honesty I see here.

-Seth

I wonder just what your foundational beliefs are that do not need justification. So far I have personally found no beliefs (not even Descartes's variously quoted "I think I think therefore I think I am") that do not demand thorough justification. This is partly why I reject belief itself for being both useless and misleading when compared to real knowledge and falsifiable hypotheses.