Okay, so obviously this is only for people who watched the debate between Craig and Scharp. Scharp posed what I thought was an odd argument, insisting that Dr. Craig's deductive arguments could only succeed if the following conditions were fulfilled:
1) His premises didn't need to just be more probable than their negation, but he needed to be 80% confident in them (a number he apparently just sort of plucked out of nowhere).
2) Craig would have to provide an account of the divine psychology of God, arguing forcefully that God would actually want to create the universe, fine-tune it for life, etc.
So, first of all, what are our opinions of these conditions. Isn't the second one a bit of a stretch? We can infer intentionality in any number of instances without knowing anything about the psychological motivations behind any unseen agents merely based on the improbability of their being no intentionality, right? So, that point seems to counter much of what Scharp was arguing.
Moreover, does epistemic confidence feature as prominently in arguments as Scharp may have suggested (particularly in deductive arguments)? Admittedly, it has been a while since I have read any technical work on epistemology.
1) His premises didn't need to just be more probable than their negation, but he needed to be 80% confident in them (a number he apparently just sort of plucked out of nowhere).
2) Craig would have to provide an account of the divine psychology of God, arguing forcefully that God would actually want to create the universe, fine-tune it for life, etc.
So, first of all, what are our opinions of these conditions. Isn't the second one a bit of a stretch? We can infer intentionality in any number of instances without knowing anything about the psychological motivations behind any unseen agents merely based on the improbability of their being no intentionality, right? So, that point seems to counter much of what Scharp was arguing.
Moreover, does epistemic confidence feature as prominently in arguments as Scharp may have suggested (particularly in deductive arguments)? Admittedly, it has been a while since I have read any technical work on epistemology.
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