Michael Sudduth

In 2021, the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (hereafter, BICS) sponsored an essay competition (hereafter, the Contest) designed to solicit the best evidence for the hypothesis that human consciousness survives bodily death, and more specifically, evidence that would prove this hypothesis beyond a reasonable doubt. The summer 2022 issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration featured a special subsection on the BICS contest and its winning essays. Robert Bigelow and Colm Kelleher outlined the motivation, design, and judging criteria for the competition. Keith Augustine provided an extensive critical commentary on the contest design and eight of its prominent winning essays. Stephen Braude and several coauthors responded to Augustine’s criticisms, and Augustine provided a reply to Braude and his collaborators. Finally, the subsection concluded with a collaborative paper in which Etienne LeBel, Adam Rock, and Augustine proposed a more rigorous experimental design for testing the survival hypothesis. Augustine presented important criticisms of the Contest and several of its prominent winning essays. Moreover, many of his criticisms apply to survival literature in general and so are instructive for the wider survival debate. And Braude, one of the most important contributors to the survival debate since C.D. Broad and C.J. Ducasse, was at the helm of the reply to Augustine. Although the response to Augustine raised important concerns about skeptical assessments of the evidence for survival, it was hamstrung with several defects. 1. Preliminaries 2. Problematic Aspects of the Reply to Augustine 3. What is the Question? Honing in on the Actual Disagreement 4. Inference to Best Explanation 5. Confirmation Approaches to Evidential Support -- 5.1 Evidential Justification -- 5.2 When Does an Observation Favor One Hypothesis Over Another Hypothesis? The Law of Likelihood -- 5.3 When Should We Up Our Confidence in a Hypothesis? Incremental Confirmation -- 5.4 How Can We Determine the Net Plausibility of a Hypothesis? Bayes’ Theorem and Posterior Probabilities -- 5.5 Which of Two Hypotheses is More Probable than the Other? Principle of Contrastive Posterior Probabilities -- 5.6 When Does Evidence Justify Believing a Hypothesis? Principle of Absolute Confirmation -- 5.7 Survivalist Confusions about Bayesian Analyses -- 5.8 The Washing Out of Priors -- 5.9 The Subjectivism Objection -- 5.10 Summing Up Insights from Confirmation Theory -- 6. Back to Braude 7. Varieties of Skepticism 8. Neurophysiological Evidence and the Survival Hypothesis 9. The Data from Mediumship 10. The Alleged Improbability of Fraud and Other Counterexplanations 11. Mediumship and the Logic of Confirmation 12. The Significance of Failed Tests 13. Survivalist Rescues and Contrastive Confirmation 14. Evidential Support without Predictions -- 15. The Testability Problem -- Concluding Remarks

The concept of epistemic defeat or defeasibility has come to occupy an important place in contemporary epistemology, especially in relation to the closely allied concepts of justified belief, warrant, and knowledge. These allied concepts signify positive epistemic appraisal or positive epistemic status. As a first approximation, defeasibility refers to a belief’s liability to lose some positive epistemic status, or to having this status downgraded in some particular way. For example, a person may be epistemically justified in believing some proposition p at one time, but then the belief might become less justified or even unjustified at some later time. Moreover, beliefs may also be prevented from having or acquiring some positive epistemic status in the first place. So more generally, defeasibility refers to a kind of epistemic liability or vulnerability, the potential of loss, reduction, or prevention of some positive epistemic status. A defeater is, broadly speaking, a condition that actualizes this potential. This article begins by outlining two general types of defeaters: propositional defeaters and mental state defeaters. Propositional defeaters are conditions external to the perspective of the cognizer that prevent an overall justified true belief from counting as knowledge. Mental state defeaters are conditions internal to the perspective of the cognizer (such as experiences, beliefs, withholdings) that cancel, reduce, or even prevent justification.

In this paper I present a critical response to several claims made by John Beversluis on the closely allied topics of natural knowledge of God and the noetic effects of sin in relation to the work of John Calvin and Alvin Plantinga. I challenge Beversluis’ claim that Plantinga has misconstrued Calvin’s position on the sensus divinitatis and that he has weakened Calvin’s doctrine of the noetic effects of sin. Moreover, I develop a coherent case for the sense in which Calvin maintains that fallen humans do and do not have a natural knowledge of God. My conclusion rebuts Beversluis’ claim that Calvin denies any natural knowledge of God for fallen human persons and defends Plantinga’s philosophical account of Calvin’s sensus divinitatis.

This paper presents a critical analysis of Alvin Plantinga’s recent contention, developed in Warranted Christian Belief (forthcoming), that if theism is true, then it is unlikely that religious unbelief is the product of properly functioning, truth-aimed cognitive faculties. More specifically, Plantinga argues that, given his own model of properly basic theistic belief, religious unbelief would always depend on cognitive malfunction somewhere in a person’s noetic establishment. I argue that this claim is highly questionable and has adverse consequences for Plantinga’s epistemology of religious belief. Plantinga’s proper basicality thesis together with his view of rationality defeaters suggests that there are circumstances in which theistic belief would not be proper function rational even if theism is true.

In the present paper I address two significant and prevalent errors concerning to natural theology within the Reformed theological tradition. First, contrary to Alvin Plantinga, I argue that the idea of properly basic theistic belief has not motivated or otherwise grounded opposition to natural theology within the Reformed tradition. There is, in fact, a Reformed endorsement of natural theology grounded in the notion that theistic belief can be properly basic. Secondly, I argue that late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Reformed criticisms of natural theology do not constitute an objection to natural theology as such but rather an objection to natural theology construed in a particular way. I explore the nature of this objection and its compatibility with an alternative understanding of natural theology.