Philosophy of Religion - A Look at Street Epistemology with Cordial Curiosity

This video serves as something of an introduction to the topic of the philosophy of religion, in which we take a look at an interview in the "Street Epistemology" style on the topic of Christianity. Cordial Curiosity's discussion ranges across several topics, so our analysis here is quite broad as well.
Cordial Curiosity's original video: • I Didn't Even Learn Th...
Videos/topics mentioned:
St. Anselm's Ontological Argument: • Prof. McCoige on St. A...
Thomas Aquinas' Five Ways: • Aquinas' Five Ways
Epistemology distinguished from Metaphysics, as well as A Priori from A Posteriori: • Two Distinctions: A Pr...
Epistemological Normativity: • William Clifford and E...
Lecture on faith by Dr. Thomas Humphries: • "Just Enough Faith to ...

[@michaelnelson3652]

The problem with Street Epistemology is not that it forces people to think about their beliefs--that's perfectly fine and actually very good. It's that the SE people tend to selectively pick out poorly educated people off the street, ask them questions they know won't receive sophisticated answers to, and then post the videos all over the internet in order to try and paint all religious believers with a broad brush. This kind of thing could be done against any group: atheists, democrats, vegans etc. in order to make them look bad. And if you post hours worth of footage of people unable to give good reasons for a position, viewers will be erroneously led to conclude that there aren't, in fact, any good reasons for a position.
A much better and more honest approach would be to focus on the best arguments for a position. Interview Noam Chomsky, or Robert P. George, or Ed Feser, or Graham Oppy, and see why they hold the (radically different) views they do. That would be much more interesting than this.

[@Historyans]

So, respectfully, I disagree with this. The thing I appreciate about SE is that it does look at the person on the street and the reasons why they believe what they believe. Yes, this could and should be done with any belief. But limiting these sorts of conversations to certain people is elitist. Some may not think Tia's reasons are the best, but it doesn't matter. They are hers, and they help us understand where she's coming from.

[@youngidealist]

Jesus, Vince, you're all over the place. Criticism 1: Our beliefs are generally considered 100% confident while their probabilities of being true might be different.

[@profmccoige]

Of course, SE is no more of a "trick" than the Socratic method, as you pointed out, though it's hard not to admit that the Socratic method is a sort of "trick", albeit not in a bad way. It's a way of "tricking" someone into discovering the flaws of their thinking, which is a good thing. In general, I think that the SE method is very useful. The only thing I caution against is taking uncertainty in the moment in response to questioning as a solid argument against one's position. Rather, it's an opportunity to reconsider and either confirm or change your beliefs based upon the potential flaws that have been revealed.
To your objection regarding certainty, I don't think that the measure of degrees of certainty you're addressing can in principle be known. The kind of certainty I meant to address was what one could call "subjective" certainty, one's own justification for claiming knowledge. The more "objective" form of certainty that you've distinguished here cannot be known by the subject of knowledge, since one simply does not know what one does not know. In other words, if I knew the likelihood that someone would present an argument which would defeat my beliefs, that would change my beliefs, not merely my degree of certainty. Further, if I had reason to believe that someone could present an argument which would defeat my beliefs, I would not hold those beliefs. I could only become uncertain once those counterarguments had been presented, bringing them to my attention. At that point, if I think the counterarguments might be successful, I would no longer claim to believe the proposition in question, but instead claim uncertainty until I'd resolved the epistemological difficulty. I hope that clarifies what I meant, and I do welcome the distinction you've made.

[@youngidealist]

@@profmccoige Thanks. I think I understand what you mean now.
For the first concern, I would say that a person who practices SE and takes a low value of certainty or a lowering of that value from the conversation to be a point against their position, the SEer is doing it wrong.
The value isn't perfectly defined, but I agree with you that calling it a probability of it being true doesn't make sense. See, a lot of critics of SE have come from a presup position where their criticism always drives toward, "well how could you justify what you claim to know?" This misses the point as we aren't driving the interlocutor (IL) towards something like hard solipsism to lower their confidence.
The value they give is meant as a measure for verifying if they are doxastically open and therefore must be subjective as a value. IOW "How sure of yourself are you?"
We want to know if your ego drives your beliefs, not some idea of how vulnerable you are, as if we could intimidate you into changing your mind if we just push the right amount. There, I concede with any concern that we should make that abundantly clear.
By showing me that your confidence (not a probability) is not 100% or that if it is that you mean in some other way, like you described as a binary, we can observe through the discussion - and as a consequence, respect - if you are a person who wants to know if you are wrong and who is willing to change your mind with new arguments or new evidence. I feel a genuine love for my IL by even hearing them say that their confidence in their belief went up through our conversation, because it's genuine rational thought even if I disagree with their conclusions.
Sorry I came off abrasive. It was not a demonstration of SE on my part. We seek out criticism, but honest attempts at criticism rather than strawmanning what SE is can be hard to find.

[@youngidealist]

@@profmccoige [continued] Like it or not, the reality is that a lot of people claim to "believe" things that they might not even have thought about. How often have you seen someone say, "I don't know what I think about that. I have to ask my pastor."? This speaks to the idea that far too many beliefs are really not serving a purpose of being conclusions that people have arrived at. I personally blame it on the practice of making people's metaphysical beliefs also be their tribal identity.
For example, my mother is also Catholic. However, she believes that the Bible is fallible and will openly tell me that she is more or less a cherry-picking Catholic, without shame. Before SE, my value in critical thinking led me to be frustrated by this, but with SE, I've been able to build up a genuine respect for her beliefs. Her ACTUAL beliefs. She has explained to me how much she actually believes in a pantheistic God at the heart of it, while all I can manage to really find that sticks with her to the bitter end from Catholicism is that she's afraid for people who are homosexual. Not that they will go to hell mind you, cause she as a Church-going Catholic doesn't believe there's a Hell. THAT's too Problem of Evil for her. She fears for homosexuals over the fact that so many of them might throw away the joy of being a parent by accepting it as who they are.
This is certainly not to Generalize Catholics. Rather, the opposite. As a practicing SEer, I just want to get under the hood of what people ACTUALLY, SINCERELY, believe. It's neither enough to assume they aren't nor take the word of their personally chosen identity to really define them. That's why we ask the questions that we do in SE.

[@youngidealist]

@@profmccoige
Hmm, listening further, I think you missed the structure of the SE questions that he asked. Some of your criticisms seem to be given to Reid but speak to her belief. It's like this:
SE: "What do you believe and feel like taking about?"
IL: "I believe in X."
SE: "What level of confidence do you have in X on a scale of 0-100?"
IL: "n... yeah, I'd say about n."
SE: "Ok, cool. What would be your strongest reason for believing in X?"
IL: "I would have to say Y."
SE: "Oh, ok. That's interesting. So you believe in X because [Y in the SE's own best words]. Would that be accurate?"
IL: "Yes" [or "No" followed by continued clarification.]
SE: "If notY were true, I'm not saying it is, but if it were, would that lower your confidence in X at all?"
IL: "Yes" [or "No" followed by further requests for a true reason that they believe.]
SE: "Would you say that Y is a good reason for believing X?"
and so on, with plenty of wiggle room to get creative with it. I hope that helps.