Alston

Question 1

What is the double standard argument?

Answer 1

1. The sense experience that P confers prima facie justification to the belief that P (our senses provide us with prima facie justification for believing P)
2. Religious experience has some [worrisome] feature F
3. But sense experience has feature F as well

C. So, F does not prevent the religious experience that P from conferring prima facie justification that P
(the worrisome feature does not prevent the religious experience P from conferring prima facie justification to believing P)

Question 2

What are the worrisome features of F in the double standard argument?

Answer 2

Single modality, hard to check, don’t understand the mechanisms, influenced by what we learn

Question 3

Why compare religious experience to sense experience?

Answer 3

if sense experience can show you prima facie justification, religious experience can show you prima facie justification because they both share the same worrisome feature F, creating a double standard between the two (hence the double standard argument)

Question 4

What is the chauvinism argument?

Answer 4

1. There is some feature F that religious experience has that sense experience does not
2. For all such F, beliefs based on religious experience tell us that F is not a defeater
3. Thus, if we think F is a defeater, this is because we either start initially agnostic about whether religious experience justifies belief in the first place, or we are assuming that religious experience does not justify religious belief.

C. Thus, we should not say that F is a defeater unless we should not yet think that religious experience justifies a belief.

Question 5

What is an example of the Chauvinism argument?

Answer 5

1. Not everyone experiences revolutionary RE
2. Some people don’t have these revolutions because they reject God’s love or are sinners
3. So, it’s not a probelm

Question 6

Why does Alston think he needs both the Chauvinism argument and the double standard argument?

Answer 6

In case the double standard argument doesn’t apply. The double standard argument says that RE and SE are comparable; however, there are situations where RE differs from SE. The chauvinism argument explains why there may be a difference between the two

Question 7

Possible objections to the double standard argument?

Answer 7

There are features that our RE has that SE doesn’t (hence the birth of the chauvinism argument)

Reject P1: our sense experience that P may not always confer prima facie justification that P
i.e., we may be extremely ill and not know that there are not ants on the floor but we are hallucinating and thoroughly believe that our sense experience is telling us there are ants on the ground (Even if there are not)

Question 8

Possible objections to the chauvinism argument?

Answer 8

There may be a “bad feature” of R E that RE does not say is a “bad feature”
i.e., say someone says they had a religious experience where the devil came down and said that God isn’t real. Religious belief likely does not account for this RE, so it may not make sense to say that this worrisome feature (that does not happen in typical sense experiences) is overcome by the fact that religious belief says its ok.