mercredi 19 mai 2010

Religious beliefs are not held by evidence. So what?


Many people – especially in secularized Europe - ask me how I can be both a Priest and a scientist. They feel a strong epistemological divorce between the two passions of my life. “How can you be someone who spend your days building experimental evidences and also listen faithfully to narratives such as the creation, the miracles, and the resurrection as recounted in scripture?”
These questions are easily asked. Answering takes more time. It requires showing first, that beliefs are not only a specificity of religious knowledge but are also part of scientific knowledge; second, that the claim to hold true only what can be proven is not solidly grounded but ignores the practice of scientific knowledge; and third, that religious knowledge is not irrational but also submitted to a reasoned evaluation process.
I offer in this paper an approach to the integration of faith and reason by distinguishing between the notions of truth, evidence, belief and certitude. I contend that our religious beliefs cannot be expected to pass the “foundationalist test” since no theory of knowledge has passed it, even in experimental sciences.

1 - Sara
Mom is very happy. Little Sara, one year old, just did with her hand the “gesture” that Mom had been trying to teach her for some weeks. It’s not her first success though. Little Sara has been increasingly successful with all kinds of gestures lately. She is able to wave to Dad when he leaves in the morning. She knows how to clap her hands, grab a toy, and hold her bottle. So tonight she was able to do this new gesture. Little Sara understood that you do the gesture when sitting at the table, before Mom brings Sara’s plastic plate. Mom and Dad do the gesture too, and then they bow their heads, close their eyes. When Little Sara imitated it, it made them so happy!
Grandma is very happy. Little Sara, two years old, just did the gesture as they were in the church. Grandma did it when entering, and now Little Sara also did it nicely. Grandma is so proud. Little Sara understood that after doing the gesture, Grandma says something, usually beginning by “deergod”. Little Sara knows that after the gesture you ought to stay quiet. If you don’t, they look upset and take you out.
Little Sara is now three years old. She is able to say the words together with the gesture. “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” She knows she can bring great joy to her parents when she does it at the beginning of the family prayer. Of course Little Joshua doesn’t do it yet. He is just a baby. Then Mom or Dad say “deergod” and talk about the day, or about Grandma, or about other people. Then it is bed time and Dad reads the story of Willie the Bear.
Little Sara goes to preschool. The teacher was very impressed that Sara was able to do the sign of the cross. Not many children are. Little Sara knows about Dear God, how to talk to Dear God, what kind of thinks you say to Dear God. She knows about Dear God’s family, about Mary and Jesus.
Sara is now seventeen years old. She is a senior in high school. She comes back home tonight troubled. At the dinner table, she tells that the theology professor explained today that there is no evidence of the existence of God. She has been thinking about it all day. Sara realizes that there are a number of things in her life that she has never questioned though they are her daily realities, things that are obvious in her life, not only obvious, but important and that she holds for true. So many things that she always has accepted indisputably. For example she knows that God loves her. She has always known it, ever since she was a child, and she has had many signs of it. She was taught by her family how to search for and recognize the signs of God’s grace every day. Actually, Sara thinks, when you learn how to apperceive the signs of God’s blessings, you are able to enter that reality and you love it. Sara has gone on youth retreats with the diocese, and she has experienced the presence of God, the peace of God’s forgiveness, the deepness of the scripture, the importance of personal commitment in at least one outreach program.
Sara is much involved in the Christian Youth Network. It’s her life ever since she got out of college. She was hired by the diocese as a community organizer. She is very happy with this job. She has discovered that her commitment to her community includes a larger universal communion with people from all over the world and from all along history. The presence of God in this world and in her life is not only a personal, intimate belief but also an experience shared by thousands of people around the globe and back in time. What she holds for true about God is rooted in her own history, in her community, in the larger communion of the Church, in the reflection of theologians, in the commitment of holy people. By all her mind, soul, experience, she knows the reality of God in her existence. It makes her happy.
Sara got married. She and Ignacio are expecting a boy. Ignacio is Italian. He grew up in Milano. Like many people in Europe, he does not believe in God. He is a little indeterminate about Sara’s wish to have their son baptized.

2 – Can belief in God be rational?
In this narrative, I have tried to illustrate that what one holds for true is influenced by one’s context and is closely bound with one’s history and experiences.[1] How does Sara know that what she hold for true is indeed true? When she realizes that she never questioned a number of beliefs she had always hold for true and remained faithful to them, does Sara stick to reasonably verified beliefs or to her context of happiness? What grounds the reasons for which one may hold one’s beliefs, and how does one argue about the truth of one’s beliefs? ?
Does an existential gain help reason or, on the contrary, does it fool, confuse and obfuscate reason? For instance though faith has never been strongly significant in Ignacio’s life, he may – for the love of Sara - find himself convinced by her faith beliefs. Indeed, many people convert to their spouse’s religion when it is imposed as a requirement for marriage.
In the following sections, I would like to compare the ways by which we hold something for true in religious faith and in scientific practice.

3 - I was trained in a Popperian epistemology
I was trained as a scientist in Genetics, Molecular Biology, and Biochemistry. I was trained in a Popperian scientific epistemology, based on falsification: scientific models are true until proven false. This theory of knowledge is not based on certitudes. Evidences are hypothesized and experimented to test the trueness of the hypothesis. The expression according to which “scientific models are considered true until proven false” implies experimental evidences. A model is considered true when it best pictures the reality as investigated by experimentation. True, therefore means valid, accurate. Until proven false implies the continuous scientific inquiry process that builds day after day testing experiments. Sometimes a model is contradicted by a series of convergent results and has to be falsified. New results must then be taken into account and integrated in the formulation of a new model. Therefore the meaning of the word true is not equivalent to certain, intangible, definitive. True rather means to the best of our current knowledge. Such is not the common understanding, which often confuses “true” with “certain”.
My scientific knowledge is not built only of experimentally tested truths. There are many beliefs in my knowledge. For example, I have been taught about the structure of the cell membrane. I could give a lecture on the double layer of unsaturated lipids, with their hydrophobic function oriented inward, and the hydrophilic outward. I could talk endlessly about the tubular proteins allowing cell’s exchanges with its milieu. But all that knowledge I never verified. Cell membranes have never been my research topic. I could teach chemistry, and explain the structure of the atom, the whirlpool of electrons twirling around the nucleus with its neutrons and protons. I could describe how atoms interact to constitute a molecule. But all that knowledge I never verified nor experimentally tested. I have never done research in molecular chemistry.
The reason I hold this claims for true is woven with my belonging to the international scientific community. What is held in common to make it a community? It is a methodology, an epistemology, a common procedure of bringing about knowledge. We trust each other’s work. When one team publishes its work, other teams around the world reproduce the experiment which is also their research topic. They publish their experimental results after submitting them – like any potential scientific author – to a board of reviewers who know the subject well and estimate the work. Concordances or discordances occur, but never in a climax of incommensurability, for the language is worldly shared. It is the experimental procedure. Its principle relies on the fact that all other things being equal when one factor is experimentally modified. We never question a scientific model that gives an account of a reality until several concordant papers are published that question the model. And we consider that there is no point questioning what everybody agrees is accurately modeled.
As a comparison, a few centuries ago, Aquinas also considered that there was no point questioning what is accepted by all ("lex aeterna omnibus nota"). In his time, the reality of God was little questioned. It was obvious for all. Are we therefore in a similar epistemic configuration, namely a state of sciences built on basic knowledge that is accepted by all but never verified?
This is Nicholas Wolterstorff’s point as he criticizes the pretention of several theories of knowledge to dominate, mute, and shut other epistemologies. In Reason Within the Bounds of Religion,[2] he outlines an accurate approach to the integration of faith and reason. He provides a common ground between theology and science, by showing that the belief content of authentic Christian commitment should provide the Christian scholar with 'control beliefs'. Control beliefs, he demonstrates, are also found in the scientific community. His critique of epistemology continues in his article entitled Can Belief in God Be Rational If It Has No Foundations?[3] I found help in his use of the work of Thomas Reid, describing the psychological mechanisms of belief in order to define what can rightly be demanded of us in our belief formation.

4 - Popperian falsifiability
What is this unquestioned Popperian epistemology held by the international scientific community? Popperianism is essentially a form of empiricism. Its cornerstone methodology is falsifiability, the logical possibility that an assertion can be shown false by an observation. Popper's theory of knowledge is based on Hume’s. Traditional empiricism holds both that 1) all knowledge is derived from experience and that 2) universal propositions (including scientific laws) are verifiable by reference to experience.
There is a contradiction in this theory, that derives from the fact that, despite the open-ended nature of experience, scientific laws may be interpreted as empirical generalizations which are in some way finally confirmable by a ‘positive’ experience. Popper eliminated the contradiction by rejecting the first of these principles and removing the demand for empirical verification in favor of empirical falsification in the second. Scientific models, for him, are not inductively inferred from experience, nor is scientific experimentation carried out with a view to verifying or finally establishing the truth of models; rather, all knowledge is provisional, conjectural, hypothetical—we can never finally prove our scientific models, we can merely (provisionally) confirm or (conclusively) refute them; hence at any given time we have to choose between the potentially infinite number of models which will explain the set of phenomena under investigation. Faced with this choice, we can only eliminate those models which are demonstrably false and rationally choose between the remaining, un-falsified models. Hence Popper emphasizes on the importance of the critical spirit to science. For him critical thinking is the very essence of rationality. For it is only by critical thought that we can eliminate false models and determine which of the remaining models is the best available one, that is, possesses the highest level of explanatory force and predictive power.[4]

5 - Faith doesn’t work that way.
Faith’s beliefs are not hypothesized and experimented but submitted to reasoning. As a scientist and a Christian, I do not hold all types of knowledge with the same epistemology. My faith does not rely on certitudes. When I use this word, I use it as a scientist, dedicated to daily building of experimental evidences. Holding together both scientific and religious practices, I try to differentiate truth from certitude. Certitudes being produced by evidences and truth being hold by a reasoning process. Being held implies a continuous process.
Yet, my friends come back to me with their questions. “How can there be an activity of your life where you prove your assertions and another activity where you just believe your assertions?” Such a question insinuates that they hold an inaccurate characterization of the difference between science and religion. It attempts to oppose scientific assertions as objective and true, as opposed to beliefs which are weak kinds of knowledge, and therefore not true, just held without sufficient inquiry. Some questions – as this one - are misguided. Some claims are misguided too. In accepting their premises, one finds oneself trapped in false assumptions. Here is an example.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the French xenophobic extreme-right party affirms “Five millions Arabs in France – five millions unemployed.” Such an allegation insinuates that unemployment is a direct consequence of immigration. Le Pen tries to grow a popular anger against the presence of immigrants, against the supposedly laxity of political leaders, unable to protect us from the Moorish hordes. It takes a long argumentation to clear the mines, to deny the spontaneous equivalence we make of these two numbers, and to oppose the alleged cause-consequence relation of the two terms.
Similarly, it takes time to show that science and religion are not exclusively and respectively on the sides of evidence and credulity. An argumentation needs be built about how scientific and religious knowledge are brought about. It requires an epistemology. Does an epistemology determine the level of genuineness of the truth claims it produces? With Wolterstorff, I contend that indeed, some epistemologies can be shown to provide insufficiently grounded truth claims.
Now, could a single epistemology account for both scientific and religious knowledge? Is there a need for a single one? Actually, the same epistemology cannot be used for truth claims in different domains because in sciences we are in the area of empiricism, whereas in religion we are in the area of rationalism. Truth claims do not follow the same path of genesis. They cannot be submitted to the same epistemology. This does not make one set of truth claims stronger, or firmer than the other one. We need to accept that experimental sciences and religion belong to different orders. Their respective epistemologies can be evaluated, but a cross evaluation is not accurate, for the same reason than one does not measure time in meters nor distance in seconds.

6 - A need for epistemology.
How do we think and come to hold something as true? We need a consistent practice for our thinking, providing means of understanding how we acquire knowledge, how we rely upon our senses, and how we develop concepts in our minds. We need epistemology to understand how to evaluate truth claims. Epistemology[5] investigates the grounds and nature of knowledge itself. It focuses on our means for acquiring knowledge and how we can differentiate between truth and falsehood.
Many debates revolve around fundamental issues which people do not recognize or never get around to discussing. Many of these are epistemological in nature: in disagreeing about whether it's reasonable to believe in the existence of God, to believe in miracles, to accept revelation and scriptures as authoritative, and so forth, disagreements arise about basic epistemological principles. Without understanding this and understanding the various epistemological positions, people will just end up talking past each other.
Now what is the debate introduced by my friends’ questions ? It involves a debate between – roughly categorized - rationalism and empiricism, where empiricism presupposes that knowledge is obtained through experience, while rationalism presupposes that knowledge is acquired through the use of reason. This debate is about epistemology. What can we know? How can we know it? How do we acquire knowledge? Can knowledge be certain? How can we differentiate truth from falsehood?
Empiricists and rationalists differ in what they consider to be appropriate criteria for truth and, therefore, the proper criteria for a reasonable belief. Debates over what one believes are unlikely to go very far unless discussing these different approaches.[6] According to empiricism, we can only know things through a posteriori knowledge - after we have had the relevant experience. Empiricists insist that truth-claims be accompanied by clear and convincing evidence which can be studied and tested. According to rationalism, it is possible to know things before we have had experiences - a priori. Rationalists believe that "truth" can be attained through rational evaluation of different sources of knowledge, not only experimental. There are no third options here (except, perhaps, for the skeptical position that no knowledge is possible at all).
But my twenty five years experience as a scientific reseacher tells me that in a number of theories of knowledge, what is held to be true is funded on unverified assumptions. Therefore, unverified beliefs are not a specificity of the religious area but are shared by number scientists. Wolterstorff writes “Anthony Flew contended that if one scrutinizes how people guard their religious convictions one sees that they treat them as compatible with the happening of anything whatsoever. In other words, these beliefs are not falsifiable. And because they are not falsifiable they do not constitute genuine assertions. [..] Scientists convinced of the truth of some scientific theory behave exactly the way Flew says religious believers do.”[7]
Furthermore, when scientists come along with experimental data that do not fit with - or contradicts - an accepted scientific model, they have to arbitrate in rejecting either the model or the experiment. “Does the falsification test now instruct you forthwith to surrender the theory? Not at all. For no theory stands alone. Every theorist confronts the world with a whole web of theoretical and non-theoretical beliefs”[8], Wolterstorff continues. He illustrates the scientist’s surrendering of his falsification test before the intimidation power of the web of theories by quoting[9] a convincing tale written by Imre Lakatos about a pre-Einsteinian physicist who cannot make sense of a scientific observation and steps on the accelerator, accumulating new experiments, drowning the initial one, rather than questioning the accepted model.
So if we cannot submit even science to the foundationalism test, why should we submit religious belief? This question may undermine the fallacious pretension of foundationalism to label all other theories of knowledge as untenable; nevertheless it does not suffice to prove that foundationalism is itself challenged as being a theory of “genuine science.” We still need to establish that non-foundationalist epistemologies can be rightly grounded and justified, and at what condition.

7 - A criticism of the “Evidentialist Challenge”
The primary challenge posed to philosophers of religion has come from the understanding of truth in terms of ‘foundationalism’ or ‘evidentialism,’ initiated by Descartes and given religious expression by John Locke: “No religion is acceptable unless rational, and no religion is rational unless supported by evidence.” As a consequence, Christian scholars, particularly in the contemporary West, have been repeatedly confused and intimidated by this challenge in their theorizing, as they perceived it to be an overwhelming one for Christian and theistic belief.
Foundationalism, broadly speaking, is the view that beliefs, in order to be rational, must be intrinsically reasonable, i.e. self-evident or evident to our senses, or be justified by inference from other secure, basic first principles via a finite chain of reasons. One can summarizes the foundationalism challenge as: 1) theistic beliefs are not properly basic beliefs because they are neither self-evident nor evident to the senses; 2) therefore religious beliefs can be rational only if they are warranted by sufficient evidence; 3) since this is not the case, theistic beliefs are not rational and should not be believed.
Fondationalists claim that “A theory of knowledge belongs to genuine science if and only if it is justified by some foundational proposition and some human being could know with certitude that it is thus justified. And in turn, a proposition is foundational if and only if it is true and some human being could know non-inferentially and with certitude that it is true.”[10] This claim has widely influenced the general scientific pretention that such theory produces knowledge that is neutral and objective. But this claim is weakened by the fact that foundationalism itself is not faithful to its own requirements. Therefore, foundationalism cannot pretend to deny Christianity’s epistemology.
According to Wolterstorff, the specific problem with foundationalism, is that first, it is too restrictive, for much of what we believe to be true is not justifiable in terms of foundationalism. Second, it is not operational, for “no one who has professed to be a foundationalist has ever followed the norms to which he subscribes.”[11] Third, foundationalism itself is a belief: its chief precept – that the only properly basic beliefs are those that are self-evident or incorrigible – is not itself self-evident or incorrigible.
John Locke described the evidentialist challenge to theistic belief as consisting in two contentions. First, it would be wrong for a person to accept Christianity, or any other form of theism, unless it was rational for him to do so. And second, it is not rational for a person to do so unless he holds his religious convictions on the basis of other beliefs of his which give to those convictions adequate evidential support.[12] Being rational consists in not violating these two duties of believing. Wolterstorff focuses his argument on the former, using Thomas Reid’s substantiation that if we want to understand knowledge and rationality, we cannot talk only about the abstract relations holding among propositions, along the way making unreflective assumptions about the “mechanisms” which form our beliefs. We must look ahead-on at the psychological “mechanisms” involved in belief formation, for “articulate epistemology requires articulate psychology.”[13]

8 - An epistemology of religious beliefs
Thomas Reid, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, elaborated about belief formation, arguing that we each have “a variety of dispositions, inclinations, and propensities, to believe things… What accounts for our beliefs is the triggering of one and another such dispositions.” Does this suffice to justify our beliefs as true, just because we can rationally conceive a belief as true in the moment? What responsibility do we have to evaluate whether our beliefs are rational or not?
As Wolterstorff puts it, “it is Reid’s view that we are prima facie justified in accepting the deliverances of the credulity disposition until such time as we have adequate reason in specific cases to believe the deliverances false... the deliverances of our credulity disposition are innocent until proved guilty...”[14]
Reid introduces a fruitful distinction by showing that “what is true” is a different question than “are we justified to hold such or such beliefs.” He shows that one could be justified in holding control beliefs that are false, for rationality is always contextual. Reid perceived that knowledge and rationality need to be apprehended not only through abstract relations holding among propositions, but also the psychological “mechanisms” involved in belief formation. Articulate epistemology requires articulate psychology to describe the psychological mechanisms of belief formation. First, each of us has “belief dispositions, inclinations, and propensities” that help account for their beliefs.[15] These belief dispositions produce their effects immediately. Second, each of us also has a “reasoning disposition” that allows evaluating a proposition in the light of other beliefs, and produce “mediate beliefs” as opposed to “immediate beliefs” produced by our belief dispositions.[16] Third, we gradually acquire another kind of belief dispositions by the “inductive principle,”[17] which is comparable to Pavlovian conditioning. Finally, Reid argues that we acquire the rest of our non-innate belief dispositions by “operant conditioning, working on our native belief dispositions.”[18]
Yet, Reid shows we are not entitled to believe anything; we are justified in holding beliefs that are natural to us until we have reason not to. Indeed, if a belief is questioned, even one’s experience of God, one should be ready to inquire it further, in order to avoid being fooled by every natural disposition to belief. How so? By obedience to epistemological practices, which allow increased reliability of religious beliefs by verifying how believers come to believe and whether or not the belief is rational. As a consequence, what would be irrational would not be the failure of the belief to fit into some system built on sensory evidence or self-evident propositions, but instead would be the failure to submit the belief to epistemological inquiry. Rationality or irrationality does not reside in any particular belief, but rather in the believer’s willingness to rationally seek the reliability and truthfulness of his or her beliefs, and to eliminate error as he or she finds it.
Hence, the disposition to believe in God is a situated rationality. The proper question is not whether it is rational to believe that God exists, but whether it is rational for this or that particular person in this or that situation to believe. Therefore, whether some specific person who believes immediately that God exists is rational in that belief "can only be answered by scrutinizing [...] the ways in which that believer has used his noetic capacities.”[19] I contend, after Reid, that articulate epistemology requires articulate psychology, and that we must look at the psychological mechanisms involved in belief formation, for rationality is always contextual.

Conclusion.
In a number of theories of knowledge, what is held to be true is funded on unverified assumptions. Exploring different epistemological theories allows to shows that it is quite difficult to know anything with certitude. Though, this is not sufficient to doubt all epistemological theories. In this paper, I have used Wolterstorff’s deconstruction of epistemological theories namely foundationalism and evidentialism, to claim that philosophical arguments against Christianity just don’t work and that fondationalism and evidentialism cannot pretend to deny Christianity’s epistemology.
Although reasoning is not the only way of obtaining rational beliefs, reason can and should be used to modify beliefs. Therefore, belief in God can be rational if it is simply obtained through our childhood credulity disposition, and it is also rational for belief in God to be abandoned in the face of overpowering arguments.
In human relationships, we do not dwell in an area of certitudes, but one of trust, confidence, givenness, love. Faith is a relationship in which we dwell by belief, not by certitude. Such is also the fate of science, whatever the rumor says. For Sciences are falsely held to be woven with certitudes. Thanks to Wolterstorff, faith is freed from the suspicion of being devoid of rationalism.

Fr. Antoine Carlioz, PhD, ThM. is both a Priest and a Scientist, aiming to wove these two vocations through 1) his full-time activity as a research engineer in cancer genetics (Laboratoire d’Oncobiologie, Hôpital Nord, Marseille, France), 2) his commitment with the Espace Ethique Méditerranéen (Public Hospital System of Marseille), and 3) his involvement as a theologian and a priest in the Communauté Mission de France, better known as the “worker priests”.
He earned at the Université Paris-Sud a Bachelor of Biochemistry (1983), a Master of Microbiology (1985), a PhD in Molecular Biology (1988); then a Bachelor of Theology and Philosophy (1997, Institut Catholique de Paris); and a Master of Theology (2009, Duke University, Durham, NC).
He was ordained a Priest in 1998 for the Catholic Diocese of the Mission de France (the “worker priests”) and was appointed an associate Pastor (1997-2008) at Ste Claire Chapel, Marseille. Before his current professional position, he worked as a Research Engineer, (2004-2008) in clinical proteomics, Laboratoire d'Oncobiologie, Hôpital Nord, Marseille, a Research Engineer, (1997-2004) at the Fédération de bactériologie sérologie virologie, Hôpital Timone, Marseille, a Research Associate, (1992-93) at the Institut Cochin de Génétique Moléculaire, Paris; and as a Postdoctoral fellow, North Carolina State University, Raleigh NC, 1990-92.
He has worked as a volunteer Visitor, at Aides (Outreach to people living with Aids) Paris 1992-94, at the Aids Service Agency (Raleigh, NC) 1990-92, and as a full-time social worker at Centre Corot (Outreach to Homeless Adolescents/Prevention and Reinsertion) Paris 1988-90.

[1] I made up this narrative from an anecdote: one day, a fellow student proudly announced that their daughter, the night before, for the first time, made the sigh of the cross. He was visibly very happy of it.
[2] Nicholas Wolterstorff, Reason Within the Bounds of Religion, William B. Eerdemans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1984.
[3] Nicholas Wolterstorff, Can belief in God be Rational If It Has No Foundations? In Faith and Rationality, by Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff 1983.
[4] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Karl Popper, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/
[5] Epistemology gives us a set of tools and legacy of ideas shaped over time which can be used to great effect in order to examine and categorize thing we know by how well we know them to be related to absolute truth within the real world. The need for epistemology originated from the amazing variety of explanations given to natural phenomena before the maturation in science. Most every attempt at developing a universal theory of everything has fallen between the contradictory interpretations of two Pre-Socratic philosophers, Heraclites and Parmenides. The former described the world as a constant flux of changes while the later described the opposite in a world in which permanence was the basis of the universe and all movement and changes must be illusions, because movement is impossible as everything in the universe is manifestly the same thing in a unitary singularity. Building from this base it may be possible to find a medium in between these two conceptions on the universe and its nature that would come close to being a complete and consistent true theory of everything. http://knol.google.com/k/aaron-rogier/overview-of-epistemology/24bv85eaq9if4/6#
[6] Rationalism is not a uniform position. Some rationalists will simply argue that some truths about reality can be discovered through pure reason and thought (examples include truths of mathematics, geometry and sometimes morality) while other truths do require experience. Other rationalists will go further and argue that all truths about reality must in some way be acquired through reason, normally because our sense organs are unable to directly experience outside reality at all. Empiricism, on the other hand, is more uniform in the sense that it denies that any form of rationalism is true or possible. Empiricists may disagree on just how we acquire knowledge through experience and in what sense our experiences give us access to outside reality; nevertheless, they all agree that knowledge about reality requires experience and interaction with reality.
[7] Reason Within the Bounds of Religion, op. cit, p24-25
[8] Reason Within the Bounds of Religion, op. cit, p43
[9] Reason Within the Bounds of Religion, op. cit, p44
[10] Reason Within the Bounds of Religion, op. cit. p29
[11] Reason Within the Bounds of Religion, op. cit. p34
[12] Can belief in god… op. cit. p136
[13] Can belief in god… op. cit. p149
[14] Can belief in god… op. cit. p163
[15] Can belief in god… op. cit. p149
[16] Can belief in god… op. cit. p150
[17] Can belief in god… op. cit. p150
[18] Can belief in god… op. cit. p151
[19] Can belief in god… op. cit. p176

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