Video Transcript: Lesson 8

Greetings and welcome back. We're ready for another session, and this time,  we're going to continue our discussion of the nature of self evident beliefs. Last  time, we went over the three characteristics of the self evident belief, that we  can know just by reflecting on our own self evident beliefs. We can notice that  we form beliefs without inferring them from anything else. I gave you several  examples the perceptual belief of looking out the window and seeing that it's  raining. I don't draw the conclusion that it's raining from other things that I  believe. I'm forced to believe that it's raining because I see it right in front of my  face. So it's the experience that's not derived from any other its experience is  prima facie true. That means right on the face of it, or I look at it and it looks  right, and its experience is irresistibly true. It I don't reflect on Oh, there seems to be moisture in the air. Oh, it seems to be splashing on the windowsill. Maybe it's  raining. No, no, you look out, you see it's raining, and it forces on you, it creates  in you the belief that it's raining. Now, those are the descriptive characteristics.  Those are the ones we can know by reflecting on our own experiences and  seeing that they conform to this. In addition, however, there have been three  very famous restrictions placed on it by the theories of some influential thinkers,  first of which was Aristotle and the second of which was Descartes. They lived  very long period of time apart. Aristotle died around 3, 300-330 BC, and  Descartes died in 1650, AD, so they are almost two what to come to 6, 7, 2000  years apart, and yet they contribute to this same tradition. It has to be  experienced. Aristotle says, if it's genuinely self evident, will be experienced as  self evident by all the experts in the field in which it arises. That's in the case of  science sciences. And remember that He's going to rule out sense perception  altogether by the second one, it has to be a necessary truth. It's only laws. Now  want to tell you something about what's going on back at this Aristotle. If you ask him, What is it that's divine? What is it that's the divine reality? All the rest  depend on picks logic as the primary candidate. It's logical truths that are the  most certain in existence, and therefore he wants them to be the most certain in  our knowledge. They exist both certainly, and their truth is the most certain truth  we can have, and that's his reason for saying it's laws. In other words, it's a  religious bias. He's got a belief in the principles of rationality as divine, and  therefore he wants to say only they can be genuinely self evident. They're the  most real, and they have the best sort of justification. They're self evident. So he wants to restrict it. It's actually a religious bias. So if you use those restrictions to say that belief in God can't be self evident, you've begged the question wildly.  You've presumed the existence of a different divinity and therefore ruled out  God. Not a very convincing argument. Okay? So he wants everybody to be in  agreement, because all people are irrational. They'll see it only only laws,p  because they're the rational principles, the laws of back of logic and  mathematics. And finally, if they pass those two, Aristotle says, and Descartes  echoes him, then it cannot possibly be wrong, there is absolute certainty. It's not 

Actually, I find them to be crap. Let's start here. It's experienced true by  everybody. How would you ever know? How can you know for any truth that  everybody who ever lives and everybody who ever will live is going to agree with it. You can't know that. You can't know that for any truth. There's another  problem with this. Remember. The ancients believed that you had certainty only  if, if a truth, if a belief was proven or self evident. So let's ask of this restriction, is it proven or self evident? It has to pass its own test, right? Is it experienced true  by everyone? Nope, not. Experienced true by me. Looks false to me, therefore it flunks its own test. So not only can you not know, for all the people in the past or the future whether they found a particular belief self evident, you won't know  that, but it itself isn't self evident by its own restriction. Apply it to itself and it  flunks. There are all kinds of expressions for that hoist on its own petard is the  expression that comes to us from Shakespeare. It's a petard was a landmine.  And if a guy went out and tried to set a landmine and did it wrong, blew himself  up, then he was hoist, lifted in the air by his own petard, his own land mine.  Modern in contemporary philosophy talk. It's called self referentially incoherent.  When it refers back to itself, it creates an incoherence. It doesn't pass its own  test, as long as there's one person who doesn't agree with it, it's not self evident. So is it proven? And the answer is, nobody's ever even tried to prove it in the  2300 years since it was proposed. That's because nobody can think of what  premises you would ever put down that could yield this. And if you did put down  premises that would yield that, would they be self evident or proven? Apparently, not. So nobody ever even gave it a shot look at the second one, it's got to be a  law. Feel like saying, Who says it's got to be a law? Why can't it be self evident  to me that I have a mole somewhere in my body, most people don't see and that I have it removed, but still self evident in my memory that I had it, nobody else is going to find out, and it's not a law. Well, why is it self evident? Why does it have to be only laws? Well, I already told you why Aristotle wanted it to be that way.  He regarded the laws of logic as divine. That's the divine reality. That's the heart  and soul of rationality. He had in his cosmology. He had an idea of the universe  with the Earth at the center. Putting the Earth at the center of the universe  meant it was the worst place in the universe for him. And with every sphere that  went out from that, every layer of the universe out, things became less physical  and more rational, until finally, you came to the realm of pure rationality. And  there, he argued there was a purely rational entity that thought only about itself,  and he called it God. But that God was not the creator of the world. That God  didn't care about people. There was no point in worshiping that God, because it  never had thought about anything but itself. So it clearly stems from a religious  belief. Well, let's ask about this. Does it have proof? And if it doesn't, is it self  evident? Well, the same thing is applies in the case of this second restriction as  applied in the case of the first nobody's ever even tried to prove it in the 2300  years since it was proposed, because nobody can think of what the premises 

would look like from which you could draw this as an inference. And besides, if  you did find some of those premises, the same problems would arise for them  over again, is it proven? Is it self evident? Now in this case, however, there's an  additional difficulty for this to be self evident. It would have to also itself be a law, because that's what the restriction says, Only laws can be self evident. So is  that statement itself a law? If it's not a law, then this second restriction has no  proof and can't be self evident. But here's the here's the catchy part. Watch this.  See this would also have to be necessary to be self evident. But the only way  you could know whether it was necessary is if it was self evident, because it  doesn't have a proof. So you need to know that it's necessary, to know that it's  self evident, and you need to know that it's self evident to know that it's  necessary. So it goes in a hopeless circle and there's no way to get out of it. So  you can't get either one. They might both be true, but they might as well just  both be false. There's no way to find out. Finally, there's one other way that you  can check on whether a statement is a necessary truth, and this takes little  explaining, so I'm going to remove all this stuff. I take it that you've copied it  down by now, and if not, you'll back up and copy it down. But I'm going to show  you how we can check on whether a statement is a necessary truth or not. The  answer is that if it's a necessary truth, you will have to contradict yourself to  deny it necessary truths All have self contradictory denials. So take, for  example, all bachelors are unmarried. Is that a necessary truth? Well, to deny it,  you would have to say some Bachelor is married, is that self contradictory? Yes,  it is. Bachelor means an unmarried person. So saying a bachelor is married  contradicts itself, and that shows that this is a necessary truth. So let's try that  same thing with the second restriction, genuine self evident truths are all  necessary truths. The denial of that is some self evident truths are not  necessary truths. Does that contradict itself the way married bachelors does? Is  it self contradictory to say that I looked out the window and I could see that it  was raining and that was self evident to me? Is that self contradictory just  because it's not a necessary truth? But so what? There's nothing about that look self contradictory at all. So there's no reason to believe this is a necessary truth.  You see what I mean? The married bachelor's impossible is self evident, but not  necessary impossible? No, that's the very claim you're trying to make here, but  there's no reason to think it's right we experience self evident truths all day,  every day, that are necessary. So why think that this proposal is right, not our  experience? And finally, let's take the claim that genuine self evident truths are  infallible. That means there's no way for them to be false. They can't possibly be and one of the things, one of the ways that would have to one of the conditions  that would have to be true for that to be true, is we have some belief forming  capacity which cannot be mistaken. Descartes explicitly says that when we  know something by intuition, it can't be false. But is this true? What reason  would we have to think that any capacity we possess can never make a 

mistake? Our ability to calculate logically and mathematically can make  mistakes, right? That's why we have computers. We can add a column of figures and make a mistake. We can try to draw an inference in logic and make a  mistake. Think we have a valid argument when we don't. Happens all the time.  So what belief forming? Oh, no. It's not that. It's not the ability to calculate, say,  Descartes and Aristotle. No. It's our intuition that can't be mistaken. Now look,  part of this by saying it's impossible that it be mistaken means that we can't think of any set of circumstances under which it could be I'm going to say it again, for  this to be true, for to be true that there is some capacity to form beliefs that we  have that can't possibly be mistaken, it means we cannot think of any set of  circumstances under which we would be mistaken using that capacity, I don't  think anything survives when you try to say that, let me show you. Tell you why.  Suppose I believe that 1 + 1make 2. And it looks self evident to me. I haven't  inferred that from anything else. It looks true on the face of it, it's just just fine.  The way it is 1 + 1 is 2. Is there any circumstance that could make me wrong  about that? I think there is, suppose alpha Centurions have come to our galaxy,  and they are encircling the Earth in an invisible spaceship and bombarding the  earth with Tachyon waves that make us all think 1 + 1is 2, when actually it's not.  And they're all there laughing their asses off at us because we think that's a  certain truth, and they know it's not. I'm not saying that is the case, but  remember, what this said was, we have an infallible capacity if there's no way to  think of any circumstance under which we could be wrong and there's a  circumstance under which we could be wrong about anything, I think only God's  infallible. We believe infallibility to God. You know the story in Genesis about the  first people with whom God made his covenant and their disobedience. Their  disobedience is not described in Genesis as consisting of wanting more on the  menu than they were allowed to have. It wasn't really what they wanted to eat.  Their motive was, and this was the temptation. God doesn't want you to eat that  because he knows that what you do you'll be as smart as he is, and you'll know  things just the way God does. It was their desire to be divine that led them to  their fall. They wanted to be infallible. They wanted to know the way God knows  and know what God knows. They said you ate the fruit I told you not to eat,  right? We'll leave infallibility. For God, and we'll leave the hallowed and ancient  restrictions on self evidency for the trash collectors. That's where it really  belongs. And my conclusion from all this is not that there are no self evident  truths. There are. There are more than these people were willing to allow us to  have. But we're saying to them, you're not going to dictate from on high what  we're allowed to count as self evident. We will tell you what we experience as  self evident. We can report what we experience as those three characteristics  having. And when billions of people say, among them is that God exists. You've  got no reason to say that's not a genuine self evidency. You can you can try to  give your own arguments for saying they experience that way, but they're still 

mistaken. You could argue it's still a mistake, but they have a powerful  justification for that belief. It's not the only justification. There's more to the story.  There's more to come. But I wanted you to understand about the restrictions. It's why Christians didn't try to make the claim, and why they resorted to proofs  instead. And now, in our next session, I want to tell you what some of those  proofs are. The next two sessions, we'll look at some of those proofs. I'll explain  why they don't work, but I'll also explain why offering such proofs is not a project  Christians ought to engage in.