tom_cr comments on Is my view contrarian? - Less Wrong
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I will admit to not being all that familiar with contemporary arguments in the philosophy of religion. However, there are other areas of philosophy with which I am quite familiar, and where I regard the debates as basically settled. According to the PhilPapers survey, pluralities of philosophers of religion line up on the wrong side of those debates. For example, philosophers of religion are much more likely (than philosophers in general) to believe in libertarian free will, non-physicalism about the mind, and the A-theory of time (a position that has, for all intents and purposes, been refuted by the theory of relativity). These are not, by the way, issues that are incidental to a philosopher of religion's area of expertise. I imagine views about the mind, the will and time are integral to most intellectual theistic frameworks.
The fact that these philosophers get things so wrong on these issues considerably reduces my credence that I will find their arguments for God convincing. And this is not just a facile "They're wrong about these things, so they're probably wrong about that other thing too" kind of argument. Their views on those issues are indicative of a general philosophical approach --, one that takes our common-sense conceptual scheme and our pre-theoretic intuitions as much stronger evidence than I think they actually are, and correspondingly takes the deliverances of our best scientific theories much less seriously than I do. I very strongly suspect that their arguments for theism will fit this pattern (reliance on a priori "common-sense" principles like the Principle of Sufficient Reason, for example).
I am familiar with the kinds of arguments made by people who adopt this philosophical outlook -- not in the case of theism specificially, but in other domains of philosophy -- and I don't find them all that compelling. In fact, I think they represent much of what is pathological about contemporary philosophy. So I think there is sound evidence that philosophers of religion tend to practice a mode of philosophy which, although quite sophisticated and intellectually challenging, is not particularly truth-conducive.
So you're saying they practice non-naturalized philosophy? Are you sure these are philosophers of religion we're dealing with and not AIXI instances incentivized by professorships?