I agree that, in theory, knowledge of God could come non-inferentially through some sort of "divine sense" or inbuilt veridical recognition of God's presence. However, I don't think this has much power to alter the philosophy of religion landscape for a few reasons:
1) There's nothing special about God here. *Anything* could, in theory, have some non-inferential capacity to recognize it built into human psychology. So we can't just accept claims about God's existence on the basis that maybe people who think God exists think so because of a special capacity to recognize God's existence. In principle, any argument of the form, "I just know it, through some non-inferential capacity," can only be used to assure people who already believe the claim to be true - it can never be used to convince a skeptic, unless the existence of the capacity can be convincingly demonstrated without needing to use the capacity itself - and even then, it can only assure people who believe the claim already if they have some reason to think that their belief is indeed the result of a non-inferential capacity, and there is no strong evidence undermining this claim.
2) It appears to me that there *is* strong evidence undermining the claim that we have a non-inferential capacity to recognize God. First of all, the divine sense must either be something we naturally have without needing to learn it, or something we learned. The former seems possible, since God could have put it in us, but there's no way we could learn to recognize God, unless we already have some other way of knowing that God exists. You can't learn how to recognize a good chess position without either having enough experience of the game where you saw which positions won and lost (thus giving you external confirmation of what types of positions are good or bad) or being able to reason your way to an explanation of why some positions are likely to lead to winning or losing. This is a problem for the idea that we have a veridical capacity to recognize God because belief in God is almost always learned. Most people are taught to believe in God by their parents or the surrounding culture. Not *everyone* learns to believe in God this way, but the vast majority who don't also start believing for reasons that are definitely unrelated to some non-inferential recognition capacity, such as liking a particular religious group/wanting the social benefits of being part of one, being convinced by philosophical arguments or miracle claims, or wanting the religious claims to be true, either because they feel it would give their life meaning or because they could have life after death. There are very few people who could plausibly be said to believe in God through some non-inferential recognition capacity that wasn't taught to them. At best, you could maybe say people who have religious experiences fall into this category, but even then, the way people interpret religious experiences is influenced by culture and the supernatural claims they have heard about before.
Second, we have the fact that many people don't have this divine recognition capability and are instead atheists and agnostics. These people are perfectly capable of navigating the world, reasoning, etc., without any more issues than theists. This would be quite strange if they were missing a key capacity. It would be as if blind people, despite lacking vision, had no apparent difficulties navigating the world. Also, given that the only plausible origin for the divine sense is that it was put in us by God, it doesn't make sense that anyone lacks it - did God just forget to put the divine sense in these people?
Third, we have the fact that for most of human history, people didn't believe in God. They believed in nature spirits or in polytheistic gods. You could argue that these beliefs were manifestations of the theistic recognitional capacity, but that would mean that the capacity is very weak and cannot be used on its own to establish monotheism, or even the existence of anything close to God (since the information we get from the capacity is at least ambiguous enough to be misinterpreted as mere nature spirits). Alternatively, you could argue that people did not have the capacity until the rise of monotheistic religions. This is pretty ad hoc, and of course it implies that divine sense coincidentally appeared at the exact same time that a perfectly naturalistic explanation of widespread theism - the belief in God being transmitted culturally, familially, and intellectually through generation - became available.
Fourth, even people who believe in God disagree on just about every possible claim about him, with virtually no claims having widespread consensus. The closest thing to consensus is achieved that things that are traditionally doctrines of the Abrahamic faiths, but there's an obvious reason why those things have consensus among members of the Abrahamic faiths that has nothing to do with some special capacity. Normally, if we have a veridical capacity to recognize that something exists, we can say a more about it than just that it exists, and everyone who has the capacity will agree on most of these things. After all, we tend to recognize these things by their features.
Fifth, I think the vast majority of theists would not, upon introspection, say that they believe in God because they have some built-in capacity to just recognize him. This certainly wasn't the case for me when I was a theist. The fact that even theistic philosophers have always assumed they need some argument or evidence for their position rather than treating it as obvious or something you can "just see" also suggests this.
Sixth, for most non-learned mental capacities, there's a region in the brain associated with them. Since non-inferential recognition of God can't be a learned faculty for the reasons mentioned above, it's quite strange that no region in the brain is associated with it.
Seventh, there are a lot of naturalistic reasons that explain away belief in God, and they are all based on things we actually know about evolution, history, etc. There aren't similar explanations for uncontroversial faculties like vision.
Eighth, the specific mechanism that you suggest of people being able to perceive God in mountains, sunsets, and thunderstorms, is obviously not real. The only people who "perceive God" in these things are people who already believe in God and see these phenomena as manifestations of his power, glory, or goodness. No one without some preexisting concept of God would come to believe in him just by looking at these things.
3) The idea that "heathens with 'just as much to go on' as Catholics do, have been atheists. But unless more is said, this is properly regarded by the believer as just another remote (and therefore irrelevant) skeptical scenario, the theological analogue of the brain-in-a-vat," is definitely not true. The brain-in-a-vat scenario is disregarded precisely because it's a remote scenario that never happens in real life that was specifically designed to give ad-hoc reasons why we would falsely believe all the things that appear to actually be true. That's quite different from an actually-existing scenario that lots of people are in that doesn't involve any ad-hoc postulates.
For the reasons stated, I think we have very strong evidence that there isn't a non-inferential capacity to recognize God, and that if there is, very few people actually have it, meaning theists shouldn't defend their belief in God on this basis. And in any case, unless theists can provide skeptics for a reason to think that this divine recognition capacity exists and is veridical, there's no way they can reasonably expect to convince skeptics and certainly no way to claim that skepticism about God is equivalent to skepticism about the external world - all they can do is reassure themselves.
Well the goal isn't to convince the skeptic anyway (a pointless project, I think; skeptics are always careful not to be convinced). How many of your points are equally good points against moral knowledge?
I'm a skeptic and I'd love to be convinced that God exists. It would make everything less pointless, less random, and less in my hands, something that appeals greatly to this atheist. It would all feel more like 'home', in a way I can't explain.
You seem to be under the impression that skeptics are only skeptics because, Like Thomas Nagel, they wish to be, rather than being totally underwhelmed by the evidence for His existence, inferential, non-inferential or any other kind.
Yes, certainly there are different kinds of skeptics, and different kinds of skepticism. Thought in the piece is that skeptics who doubt because, they say, "there isn't enough evidence that takes the form of miracles, or other events that an atheist couldn't explain" are wrong to demand that kind of evidence. Belief in God can be knowledge, without it. (Peter Van Inwagen, for what its worth, doesn't think it requires any evidence, not even "non-inferential" evidence.)
Regarding the analogy to moral knowledge, it's tough to deny that we have some capacity to recognize right and wrong, but it seems like claims to this capacity can be made in either direction. Take, for example, the substack sensation debates on shrimp welfare. The anti-shrimp side will claim that we can just recognize that no amount of shrimp pain can ever be worth a human life, and the the pro-shrimps will counter that we can just recognize that pain is bad, so the rest is all rationalization. It would be good for the two sides to have some way to make progress, rather than just shout back and forth about how the other's recognitional capacities are malfunctioning.
But maybe this is less desirable, or at any rate possible, with something like religion and belief in God. It's not for nothing that the Catholic Church denies that doctrines like the Trinity and the Incarnation can be proven by reason, and it's up to God to give or withhold the gift of faith.
You can also look at Wittgenstein's "hinge beliefs" as an attempt to describe this gap without taking a stand for either side. It feels like he gets adopted by the religious fictionalists more often, but there's nothing about his analysis that precludes belief in God or even in a particular religion. Everybody knows about Anscombe and Geach, but somebody like Herbert McCabe, OP could state three of the Five Ways as arguments about what's demanded (or made impossible) by our use of language, or use demythologizing rhetoric to affirm the Resurrection, rather than to reformulate or reject it.
Finally, the point about seeing the thoughts and emotions of others through their faces and bodies put me in mind of Edith Stein, whose earliest work was about this capacity, and who went on to write multiple major works discussing the relationship between phenomenology and Catholic philosophy (especially Thomism), but as far as I know never appealed to our capacity for recognition, as it is here (or in Wittgenstein or Plantinga). Perhaps she would have, if she had not been murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
It's true, appeal to capacities can't break a deadlock between opposing camps. At best, the correct view can use it as an internal defense against skeptical challenges. Since that's (I think) a good and the only available defense against skepticism about perceptual knowledge (external world skepticism), it's not nothing.
On my interpretation of Williamson's account, the moral "knowledge" that he gives us is pretty thin gruel. His moral realism is metaphysically agnostic, nothing more than the claim that moral predicates have non-empty intensions. Once we grant that claim, interpretive charity recommends that whenever we see broad agreement among competent speakers that a given moral sentence is true, we should assume that it is in fact true. And if speakers' reasons for asserting that sentence are modally safe, we should say they "know" it is true.
Two points worth emphasising:
(i) Williamson's minimalist realism tells us nothing about the sort of stance-independence that metaethicists have traditionally worried about. Parallel accounts can be constructed for our knowledge of properties like deliciousness, boorishness, or chicness. If we want a more metaphysically weighty knowledge of God than we possess of those sorts of phenomena, it will need to be based on different sorts of considerations.
(ii) Agreement among competent speakers plays a central role in the account. Williamson himself admits that "the extent of moral disagreement puts an upper limit on moral reliability." I think this makes it difficult to build a parallel account of religious knowledge. Religious agreement among competent speakers is quite extensive, so the upper limit on the reliability of any postulated God-recognition capabilities is going to be pretty low.
How do you think we come to have recognitional capacities? Is the story of how we come, say, to recognize persons among robots or joyful expressions among amused ones of the same shape as the story of how we come to recognize God in a sunset?
(Just in case: I ask these questions in a curious spirit, not a critical one.)
I admit to not having a useful answer to this. Hopefully someone else will! (I imagine Plantinga thinks its part of God's design plan for the human mind.)
Recognitional capacities *can* produce knowledge. But in the uncontroversial cases (e.g. trees), it seems like they meet a further condition, that we might call:
Hypothetical Inferentialism (HI): The agent's belief *could* be justified inferentially, on the basis of more foundational evidence (e.g. how things subjectively appear to the agent).
If we want to claim non-inferential knowledge without meeting the HI condition, I'm not sure how much it helps to point to cases of non-inferential knowledge that *do* meet the HI condition. It still seems pretty plausible to me that knowledge requires satisfying HI!
I agree that, in theory, knowledge of God could come non-inferentially through some sort of "divine sense" or inbuilt veridical recognition of God's presence. However, I don't think this has much power to alter the philosophy of religion landscape for a few reasons:
1) There's nothing special about God here. *Anything* could, in theory, have some non-inferential capacity to recognize it built into human psychology. So we can't just accept claims about God's existence on the basis that maybe people who think God exists think so because of a special capacity to recognize God's existence. In principle, any argument of the form, "I just know it, through some non-inferential capacity," can only be used to assure people who already believe the claim to be true - it can never be used to convince a skeptic, unless the existence of the capacity can be convincingly demonstrated without needing to use the capacity itself - and even then, it can only assure people who believe the claim already if they have some reason to think that their belief is indeed the result of a non-inferential capacity, and there is no strong evidence undermining this claim.
2) It appears to me that there *is* strong evidence undermining the claim that we have a non-inferential capacity to recognize God. First of all, the divine sense must either be something we naturally have without needing to learn it, or something we learned. The former seems possible, since God could have put it in us, but there's no way we could learn to recognize God, unless we already have some other way of knowing that God exists. You can't learn how to recognize a good chess position without either having enough experience of the game where you saw which positions won and lost (thus giving you external confirmation of what types of positions are good or bad) or being able to reason your way to an explanation of why some positions are likely to lead to winning or losing. This is a problem for the idea that we have a veridical capacity to recognize God because belief in God is almost always learned. Most people are taught to believe in God by their parents or the surrounding culture. Not *everyone* learns to believe in God this way, but the vast majority who don't also start believing for reasons that are definitely unrelated to some non-inferential recognition capacity, such as liking a particular religious group/wanting the social benefits of being part of one, being convinced by philosophical arguments or miracle claims, or wanting the religious claims to be true, either because they feel it would give their life meaning or because they could have life after death. There are very few people who could plausibly be said to believe in God through some non-inferential recognition capacity that wasn't taught to them. At best, you could maybe say people who have religious experiences fall into this category, but even then, the way people interpret religious experiences is influenced by culture and the supernatural claims they have heard about before.
Second, we have the fact that many people don't have this divine recognition capability and are instead atheists and agnostics. These people are perfectly capable of navigating the world, reasoning, etc., without any more issues than theists. This would be quite strange if they were missing a key capacity. It would be as if blind people, despite lacking vision, had no apparent difficulties navigating the world. Also, given that the only plausible origin for the divine sense is that it was put in us by God, it doesn't make sense that anyone lacks it - did God just forget to put the divine sense in these people?
Third, we have the fact that for most of human history, people didn't believe in God. They believed in nature spirits or in polytheistic gods. You could argue that these beliefs were manifestations of the theistic recognitional capacity, but that would mean that the capacity is very weak and cannot be used on its own to establish monotheism, or even the existence of anything close to God (since the information we get from the capacity is at least ambiguous enough to be misinterpreted as mere nature spirits). Alternatively, you could argue that people did not have the capacity until the rise of monotheistic religions. This is pretty ad hoc, and of course it implies that divine sense coincidentally appeared at the exact same time that a perfectly naturalistic explanation of widespread theism - the belief in God being transmitted culturally, familially, and intellectually through generation - became available.
Fourth, even people who believe in God disagree on just about every possible claim about him, with virtually no claims having widespread consensus. The closest thing to consensus is achieved that things that are traditionally doctrines of the Abrahamic faiths, but there's an obvious reason why those things have consensus among members of the Abrahamic faiths that has nothing to do with some special capacity. Normally, if we have a veridical capacity to recognize that something exists, we can say a more about it than just that it exists, and everyone who has the capacity will agree on most of these things. After all, we tend to recognize these things by their features.
Fifth, I think the vast majority of theists would not, upon introspection, say that they believe in God because they have some built-in capacity to just recognize him. This certainly wasn't the case for me when I was a theist. The fact that even theistic philosophers have always assumed they need some argument or evidence for their position rather than treating it as obvious or something you can "just see" also suggests this.
Sixth, for most non-learned mental capacities, there's a region in the brain associated with them. Since non-inferential recognition of God can't be a learned faculty for the reasons mentioned above, it's quite strange that no region in the brain is associated with it.
Seventh, there are a lot of naturalistic reasons that explain away belief in God, and they are all based on things we actually know about evolution, history, etc. There aren't similar explanations for uncontroversial faculties like vision.
Eighth, the specific mechanism that you suggest of people being able to perceive God in mountains, sunsets, and thunderstorms, is obviously not real. The only people who "perceive God" in these things are people who already believe in God and see these phenomena as manifestations of his power, glory, or goodness. No one without some preexisting concept of God would come to believe in him just by looking at these things.
3) The idea that "heathens with 'just as much to go on' as Catholics do, have been atheists. But unless more is said, this is properly regarded by the believer as just another remote (and therefore irrelevant) skeptical scenario, the theological analogue of the brain-in-a-vat," is definitely not true. The brain-in-a-vat scenario is disregarded precisely because it's a remote scenario that never happens in real life that was specifically designed to give ad-hoc reasons why we would falsely believe all the things that appear to actually be true. That's quite different from an actually-existing scenario that lots of people are in that doesn't involve any ad-hoc postulates.
For the reasons stated, I think we have very strong evidence that there isn't a non-inferential capacity to recognize God, and that if there is, very few people actually have it, meaning theists shouldn't defend their belief in God on this basis. And in any case, unless theists can provide skeptics for a reason to think that this divine recognition capacity exists and is veridical, there's no way they can reasonably expect to convince skeptics and certainly no way to claim that skepticism about God is equivalent to skepticism about the external world - all they can do is reassure themselves.
I've got to say that was kind of brilliant.
Well the goal isn't to convince the skeptic anyway (a pointless project, I think; skeptics are always careful not to be convinced). How many of your points are equally good points against moral knowledge?
I'm a skeptic and I'd love to be convinced that God exists. It would make everything less pointless, less random, and less in my hands, something that appeals greatly to this atheist. It would all feel more like 'home', in a way I can't explain.
You seem to be under the impression that skeptics are only skeptics because, Like Thomas Nagel, they wish to be, rather than being totally underwhelmed by the evidence for His existence, inferential, non-inferential or any other kind.
Yes, certainly there are different kinds of skeptics, and different kinds of skepticism. Thought in the piece is that skeptics who doubt because, they say, "there isn't enough evidence that takes the form of miracles, or other events that an atheist couldn't explain" are wrong to demand that kind of evidence. Belief in God can be knowledge, without it. (Peter Van Inwagen, for what its worth, doesn't think it requires any evidence, not even "non-inferential" evidence.)
Regarding the analogy to moral knowledge, it's tough to deny that we have some capacity to recognize right and wrong, but it seems like claims to this capacity can be made in either direction. Take, for example, the substack sensation debates on shrimp welfare. The anti-shrimp side will claim that we can just recognize that no amount of shrimp pain can ever be worth a human life, and the the pro-shrimps will counter that we can just recognize that pain is bad, so the rest is all rationalization. It would be good for the two sides to have some way to make progress, rather than just shout back and forth about how the other's recognitional capacities are malfunctioning.
But maybe this is less desirable, or at any rate possible, with something like religion and belief in God. It's not for nothing that the Catholic Church denies that doctrines like the Trinity and the Incarnation can be proven by reason, and it's up to God to give or withhold the gift of faith.
You can also look at Wittgenstein's "hinge beliefs" as an attempt to describe this gap without taking a stand for either side. It feels like he gets adopted by the religious fictionalists more often, but there's nothing about his analysis that precludes belief in God or even in a particular religion. Everybody knows about Anscombe and Geach, but somebody like Herbert McCabe, OP could state three of the Five Ways as arguments about what's demanded (or made impossible) by our use of language, or use demythologizing rhetoric to affirm the Resurrection, rather than to reformulate or reject it.
Finally, the point about seeing the thoughts and emotions of others through their faces and bodies put me in mind of Edith Stein, whose earliest work was about this capacity, and who went on to write multiple major works discussing the relationship between phenomenology and Catholic philosophy (especially Thomism), but as far as I know never appealed to our capacity for recognition, as it is here (or in Wittgenstein or Plantinga). Perhaps she would have, if she had not been murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
It's true, appeal to capacities can't break a deadlock between opposing camps. At best, the correct view can use it as an internal defense against skeptical challenges. Since that's (I think) a good and the only available defense against skepticism about perceptual knowledge (external world skepticism), it's not nothing.
On my interpretation of Williamson's account, the moral "knowledge" that he gives us is pretty thin gruel. His moral realism is metaphysically agnostic, nothing more than the claim that moral predicates have non-empty intensions. Once we grant that claim, interpretive charity recommends that whenever we see broad agreement among competent speakers that a given moral sentence is true, we should assume that it is in fact true. And if speakers' reasons for asserting that sentence are modally safe, we should say they "know" it is true.
Two points worth emphasising:
(i) Williamson's minimalist realism tells us nothing about the sort of stance-independence that metaethicists have traditionally worried about. Parallel accounts can be constructed for our knowledge of properties like deliciousness, boorishness, or chicness. If we want a more metaphysically weighty knowledge of God than we possess of those sorts of phenomena, it will need to be based on different sorts of considerations.
(ii) Agreement among competent speakers plays a central role in the account. Williamson himself admits that "the extent of moral disagreement puts an upper limit on moral reliability." I think this makes it difficult to build a parallel account of religious knowledge. Religious agreement among competent speakers is quite extensive, so the upper limit on the reliability of any postulated God-recognition capabilities is going to be pretty low.
How do you think we come to have recognitional capacities? Is the story of how we come, say, to recognize persons among robots or joyful expressions among amused ones of the same shape as the story of how we come to recognize God in a sunset?
(Just in case: I ask these questions in a curious spirit, not a critical one.)
I admit to not having a useful answer to this. Hopefully someone else will! (I imagine Plantinga thinks its part of God's design plan for the human mind.)
Recognitional capacities *can* produce knowledge. But in the uncontroversial cases (e.g. trees), it seems like they meet a further condition, that we might call:
Hypothetical Inferentialism (HI): The agent's belief *could* be justified inferentially, on the basis of more foundational evidence (e.g. how things subjectively appear to the agent).
If we want to claim non-inferential knowledge without meeting the HI condition, I'm not sure how much it helps to point to cases of non-inferential knowledge that *do* meet the HI condition. It still seems pretty plausible to me that knowledge requires satisfying HI!
imagination