Awhile ago I read Bart Ehrman’s book /God’s Problem/, on the problem of evil. Or rather, I should say I picked it up, since I don’t think I quite finished it. Too much emphasis on summarizing the Bible as opposed to anaylsis; I suspect Ehrman was out of his depth having to talk a lot about the Old Testament, when up till now his focus as a scholar and popularizer has always been on the new. But there was another issue: he emphasized that while he had abandoned Christianity in part due to the problem of evil, he wasn’t trying to change anyone else’s mind. I was reminded of this upon reading Ehrman’s dialogue with N. T. Wright, where he says many of the same things. (Via John.)

Here’s what’s wrong with this: was the problem of evil a good reason for Ehrman to abandon his faith? If not, he shouldn’t have abandoned it for that reason, and has no reason to go around telling people about it as an important problem that led him away from Christianity. On the other hand, if it was a good reason, it seems like it should be a good reason for everyone.

Ehrman explains his position by saying:

You are right that my goal is not to make agnostics out of people, either in my book or in my postings in this forum. This is because I am not so arrogant as to think that intelligent people should always agree with me!

But there’s a false dilemma between thinking intelligent people must always agree with you, and not being willing to try to persuade other people of things. No philosopher discussing disagreement today believes this. Consider Richard Feldman’s formulation of what he calls the Uniqueness Thesis:

This is the idea
that a body of evidence justifies at most one proposition out of a competing set of propositions
(e.g., one theory out of a bunch of exclusive alternatives) and that it justifies at most one attitude
toward any particular proposition.

This requires disagreement out of people who have exactly the same body of evidence, and doesn’t reduce to insisting people agree with you all the time. Philosophers sympathetic to the uniqueness thesis have suggested that often, when you’ve shared all your evidence and can’t reach a conclusion, you should meet in the middle. Even so, you don’t have to believe in the Uniqueness Thesis, or in meeting in the middle, to believe that:

If some argument (once fully understood and relevant information is known) is a reason for one person to believe something, it’s a reason for anyone to believe that same thing.

Call this “universality of reasons.” It’s a relatively weak principle, given that it allows for different people weight reasons against each other differently. It seems hard to see how anyone could deny it. And even if its false, there has to be some ability to generalize reasons for believing things, or we’d never be able to discuss anything.