Some years ago I wrote a post on whether evidentialism requires apostasy if a Christian believer discovers that he lacks good evidence for Christianity. In that post I endorsed a couple of ministries as examples of places where someone could find evidence for Christianity. At the time I didn't have as much of my own content out on the New Testament, and I also didn't know that William Lane Craig, whose ministry is Reasonable Faith, would endorse (sadly) the idea that the Gospels contain at least some fact-changing literary devices. So, although Reasonable Faith does have a lot of good content on the site, I would now mention that as a qualification on my endorsement of the ministry as an example of where to go to find strong content if you have doubts about Christianity. Also since then Apologetics315 (which I mentioned as another example) has been acquired by another ministry so that only one part of it (the podcast, I believe) is still under the same management.
On the plus side, the ministry TalkAboutDoubts has been launched since then, run by Jonathan McLatchie, and geared specifically to those who are either good-faith non-Christians looking for answers or Christians troubled by doubts. TAD is strongly evidentialist. Here is my playlist on evidentialism on my Youtube channel.
In the last few days I've had a discussion of evidentialism and the "internal witness of the Holy Spirit" on social media, and I decided that some comments that I made there should be presented in blog post form as well.
My interlocutor was endorsing the idea of an internal witness of the Holy Spirit (IWHS) that, in his words, "supersedes all rational argument." (Similarly, William Lane Craig calls the IWHS "defeater defeating.") But my interlocutor made a few stipulations: He stipulated that the IWHS may work in a way that is indistinguishable from ordinary means like prayer, Christian fellowship, taking Sacraments, etc. It may, he said, just be the holistic effect of all of those. It could be, but need not be, some sort of separate, sensible or mystical experience or feeling within the person himself.
I said that using the phrase "supersedes all rational argument" gives the impression that even if the evidence is objectively against Christianity, the IWHS can and should just swamp that fact in the mind of the believer, and I expressed disagreement with any such view. In response he said that of course the evidence, if all is known, objectively supports Christianity but that humans are fallible and limited and that all he meant by "supersedes all rational argument" is that it would supersede the fallible and limited attempts at argument in an individual believer.
He then challenged me with the hypothetical case of a believer who previously based his Christian faith strongly on the minimal facts argument for the resurrection (MFA). I've been highly critical of the force of the MFA, contending that it has been oversold to apologists, lay Christians, and skeptics. My interlocutor asked me to envisage a case in which a believer comes to recognize the weakness of the MFA but for some reason is prevented from finding any better argument. He asked rhetorically if this person should just apostasize.
With that background, here is my lightly revised answer, which I hope will be helpful to someone.
If all you mean is that it supersedes incorrect reasoning
due to fallibility and/or lack of information, then this is unhelpful to the
person himself in the situation. In fact, a big emphasis upon mere human fallibility
and the absence of full information can just as easily (and just as
(un)reasonably) undermine Christian faith even when the person does have
good information and strong arguments. The Christian with good evidential
arguments is still fallible and still lacks omniscience. These facts by
themselves don’t justify seeking or hoping for some non-rational guidance
toward the truth, and they don’t do so any more in a Christian who has realized
that his former arguments for Christianity are weak than in a person who
currently thinks that his evidence is strong. In fact, I’ve actually seen people paralyzed by a reflection on mere human limitation so that they are
hesitant to accept good arguments. So it’s really quite pointless, and I
would say pernicious, to say that there is an IWHS that “supersedes all
rational arguments” and then, upon being challenged, to punt to mere human
limitation and say that’s what one means.
I definitely don’t think the person in your scenario is
obligated to deconvert, at least not instantaneously. But your scenario is
overly simple. For example, there are evidences for theism that a person can
see for himself, even if all he can articulate self-consciously is something
along the lines of, “This all had to come from somewhere,” “Where does beauty
come from?” “Humans are radically different from animals, so where did
human minds come from in the first place?” etc.
There are also (and this is very important) ways in which
the Gospels and Acts have verisimilitude that a person can see for himself.
Obviously it helps a lot if he has someone else to point that out to him
(which is part of why I do it), but part of the beauty of internal evidences is
that they are in principle available to anyone who has the documents in question and has commonsense
knowledge about what truthful testimony is like.
You’ve made your concrete hypothetical scenario include his
knowing the minimal facts case for Jesus' resurrection and then realizing that it isn’t that strong.
But that in itself provides him with some resources for his own investigation. He
can also see, if he looks into it, that there is no evidence for merely vision-like experiences on the part of the twelve. So when we abandon the
attempt to make much of the “consensus of New Testament scholars” on what the
twelve experienced, we are (interestingly) freed up to recognize that scholarly
consensus is very messed up, constructing experiences that are contrary to what we find in our closest original sources. He can recognize that a
scholar like Allison (say) is reconstructing the resurrection accounts in a
circular fashion by arguing that the physical parts were added later just
because they are the physical parts. In other words, rejecting the MFA
contains in itself some guidance toward the right maximalist path—recognizing
the epistemic poverty of mainstream biblical scholarship and focusing on the
sources we actually have. Recognizing that the MFA is weak, in large part
because it relies on an “appearance fact” that is supposedly “granted by a
large majority of scholars,” does not entail continuing to defer to “the
consensus of scholarship.”
The person in your scenario like all of us (I might add)
should seek earnestly and sincerely after truth. And because truth in this
area—how can a man be right with God, how can he be forgiven, how can his life
have meaning, what happens after death, etc.—is so overwhelmingly important, he
has an obligation not to settle for a shallow agnosticism. I think he should be
able to see for himself the hollowness of Internet skeptics or even pseudo-Christians
like Dale Allison.
You and I both know of deconverts who claim that they “knew
all the arguments,” and it’s baloney. They didn't know all the arguments, and they are without excuse, because
they could quite readily have found better arguments, or made a better evaluation of the evidence
they already had.
You can always dismiss all of these points one at a time by
saying, “What if he doesn’t notice that? What if he ‘for some reason’ can’t see
any of that? What if…” on and on, including the stipulation that our hypothetical person somehow never stumbles, even in an earnest and long search, upon anything like the ministry of Talk About
Doubts or any of the stronger other books and content that are out there.
But remember (this is very important) that you can say something very similar about a person who has never heard of Jesus in the first
place. What if a person, from childhood and on into adulthood, is isolated
from knowledge of Christianity? What if no missionary comes to him? What if he
has no Internet? What if he’s raised to be a suicide bomber? We can always stipulate extreme epistemic disadvantages vis a vis some truth, in this case, the truth of Christianity.
A person who never hears about Jesus and is entirely embedded in an incompatible religion is in a situation that we might call maximally epistemically disfavored. If he grows up and lives and dies without
hearing the name of Christ, we have to trust in God’s justice and love as to
his eternal destiny.
Or what if a person is somewhat mentally disabled and can’t
understand much in the first place, even as an adult?
There is an Amazonian tribe that I have read about that did
have missionaries come to them, but the missionaries were not able to make any
headway, even after translating the Gospel of Luke into their language, because
the tribe has no sense of history beyond (if I recall correctly) three removes back. They would ask, “Did
you see these events happen? Did you know someone who saw them happen? Did you
know someone who knew someone who saw them happen?” And if the answer to all
of these questions was “no,” they immediately lost interest. The social and
psychological block on the ability to know history any further back than that
was so great that one of the missionaries lost his own faith as a result,
because he couldn’t handle the fact that God would allow such ignorance to
persist and block the knowledge of the truth of Christianity for an entire
people group.
So there’s no reason not to apply a similar point about our
own need to trust God concerning a person’s eternal destiny to a person who is
much less epistemically disfavored, as in your scenario. (And in this case, as in cases of people who have never heard, we just have to admit that we don't know how God is going to work in this person's life.) This person in your scenario at least
has the relevant historical documents and can to some degree evaluate them for
himself, and he knows that historical inquiry is possible, Indeed, the very
possibility that you raise of an intellectual deconversion implies that he is a
thinky kind of person and intelligent and informed enough to realize that this
is an important issue and that he needs to be earnestly seeking the truth about
it, not settling for some kind of shoulder-shrugging or even bitter and gleeful agnosticism.
But understand something: You have asserted that the IWHS is
(at least often, for many people) not detectible but consists in the holistic
effect of things like going to church, having Christian friends, taking the sacraments,
and prayer. From the epistemic perspective of our hypothetical person who has
realized that his former arguments for Christianity are weak and who does not
have some kind of mystical, overwhelming experience, all of these factors of social and ritual activities are
mirrored in religions that are incompatible with Christianity. From an
epistemic perspective, he can’t say to himself, “I have a community of faith
here, I have sacramental rituals here, I have prayer practices here, therefore
there is some appreciably high probability that Christianity is true.” Perhaps
you would agree with that. Your IWHS, especially in its indetectible form, is going to look like something that many other religions have, indeed, that almost all other religions and their practitioners have. But in that case, if you
stipulate that after trying for some time to find better evidence, that’s all he has to go on, if you insist on dismissing one after another all the points I’ve
made above about his ability to discover more evidence (saying “well, suppose he can’t
find that” “suppose he can’t see that” etc.), then in the long run the mere
fact that he’s previously been praying, meeting with other believers,
confessing sin, and so forth, doesn’t give him reason to believe that their shared beliefs are true. Nor would it be right or accurate for
someone to point him to these things as if their mere existence is significant
evidence in itself.
If a person in that situation does deconvert, due to his
love of truth, while (I will stipulate) continuing for the rest of his life to
search for the truth about eternal things, not turning into a deconvert of the
usual unpleasant and dismissive type, then we have to trust that God will deal with him justly and
lovingly, just as we would trust that for a person raised a Muslim, a Hindu,
an animist, raised on a desert island with no religion, etc. Because all of
these people are, we are stipulating, evidentially disadvantaged through
no fault of their own.
In all of these cases we can hope and even pray that perhaps
God would grant to the person an epistemically valuable non-natural experience—for
example, some kind of highly unusual dream that suddenly starts occurring, is
repeated over and over again, doesn’t have the properties of ordinary dreams,
and that directs the person toward a place where he can find better
information. (This, I’m told, sometimes happens to Muslims.) That would have some evidential value. Or a private
experience with a publicly verifiable tie-down—e.g., "Go to this place and you
will meet this person, this is his name," etc., and then you go to that place and meet the person
thus described, whom you never have seen before in your life. But we don’t know whether God will do that for any of these
people.
So a robust evidentialism does not imply an obligation to
deconversion merely upon realizing that one’s former arguments for
Christianity are not strong. A person who realizes this should reflect carefully upon what resources he still has available to him and what evidential weight they have, and he should seek to find more information. If we stipulate a case where a person who
realizes that is epistemically disfavored in a whole variety of ways that
block his acquiring and understanding better evidence for Christianity, even
while/after earnestly seeking and pondering, then there is no point in bringing
up an IWHS that works “through” his Christian religious practices. And the
gerrymandered scenario thus constructed really ends up being importantly similar
to more radical cases of epistemic disfavor that we might stipulate, even
though in those cases the person in question wasn’t a Christian in the first
place. So the idea that a believer has some special anointing or presence of
the Holy Spirit isn’t epistemically relevant to the person who is actually in the situation, nor is it relevant to what we should think about what God will definitely provide for him.
(The following paragraphs were not, in this form, contained in my original comment in the social media conversation.) Our own confidence about what God will or won't do for a person depends heavily upon other theological commitments. For example, suppose that you hold to a "once saved always saved" view. Then you'll hold that if this person has really at some time accepted Jesus as Savior, God definitely will do something that will bring him to heaven, even if you don't know what that "something" is. Or to take another example, if you're opposed to any sort of at-death or after-death experience to bring people the truth, then you may hold that both the person who has never heard and an earnest person who deconverts will go to hell and that this doesn't in any way impugn the justice of God. How one thinks election works out in the real world makes a big difference, too, so Calvinism vs. Arminianism come into play.
I am concerned here mainly to argue that the "internal witness of the Holy Spirit" that "supersedes all rational arguments" really doesn't play a helpful role here. Another point (that I had made earlier in the dialogue in question) is that if you do opt for an IWHS that is detectible as some kind of overwhelming, indescribable, defeater-defeating experience, that doesn't help either, because we know for a fact that a lot of really sincere Christians (myself included) have to say honestly that we don't have such an experience. So the idea that all Christians have this is empirically refuted.
The relationship of evidentialism to the possibility of deconversion is thus complicated. It is possible to envisage a person who is so evidentially disadvantaged that his commitment to truth understandably leads him to some type of deconversion. But it is somewhat artificial to envisage a person who is really that epistemically disadvantaged, especially if he already has access to (say) the Gospels and Acts and the Pauline epistles and is intelligent enough for intellectual deconversion to be a relevant category. If one does insist upon such a scenario, then it's doubtful that God has promised an IWHS that "supersedes all rational argument" and that should prevent that person from deconverting. Instead of postulating such an IWHS, we should trust in the justice, love, and mercy of God in this person's life, just as we would in the case of someone who had never heard of Jesus, and hold the person responsible for continuing to search for evidence about the truth of these matters of ultimate importance.