One of the mainstays of atheist rhetoric is the Argument from Evil (AfE), that there exist evils in the world, of such a quality or quantity, that it is irrational to believe in a good Creator.
This post is not directly about the Argument from Evil. Instead, I want to address the Argument from Confusion (AfC). This is the argument that no good God—especially one that wants everybody to believe in some specific religion such as Christianity—would allow the extent of human religious confusion that exists in the world. (Including a plurality of contradictory religions, but also atheism/agnosticism.) True, Christianity is the largest religion in the world, with over 2 billion people claiming to be Christians of some sort or another, but this is still a minority. Why doesn't God reveal himself more clearly? The AfC claims that this is by itself good reason not to believe in God, or at least a specific religion such as Christianity, etc.
The AfC must of course be distinguished from the general AfE. The world includes lots of unpleasant stuff (like cancer etc.), and it might be possible to view religious confusion as just a subset of such evil. It isn't totally obvious—except on some highly specific religious views about the necessary conditions for salvation—that religious confusion is the worst evil in the world. So we could treat the AfC as just a special case of the AfE. Here, I want to instead treat it as a separate argument, and see how it fares when detached from the rest of the AfE. If you think it is overwhelmingly likely that if God exists there would be no evils whatsoever, then you probably don't need an AfC. The AfE suffices. But let's suppose that God might have some reason to permit some evil, and allow human life to be difficult in various ways. Then, let's ask whether the AfC specifically, changes the situation.
It cannot be denied that the AfC has emotional appeal. What I want to argue in this post is that the argument actually has very little rational force. Specifically, it depends crucially on equivocating between different scenarios. Once we specify the scenario more clearly, we find that there is not much reasonable work for the AfC to do.
Specifically, I want to break the AfC into subcases based on the following:
- Is the argument supposed to be about (a) myself and my own confusion? [By the first person pronouns here, I mean whichever individual is considering the AfC as a possible objection to Christianity.] Or, is the argument supposed to be about (b) the confusion of other people besides me?
- Apart from the AfC (let's abbreviate this important concept as AFTAFC) would such persons be (i) rationally justified in believing in Christianity, or (ii) not rationally justified?
To be a little more technical about 2, we could adopt a Bayesian framework where people have credences in various propositions such as Christianity (which are subjective probabilities between 0 and 1, based on the evidence available to that person, and their prior sensibilities).
By contrast, let us consider belief in a religion to be a binary (yes/no) decision. After all, from the point of view of making a decision, I need to either live my life as if God exists (going to Church, praying, asking for forgiveness of sins, taking sacraments etc.) or else not bother to do this stuff. And the simplest way that credences could be related to beliefs, is that that there exists some threshold probability t, with 0 < t < 1, such that if my credence p satisfies p > t, then rationally I should believe, whereas if p < t, then rationally I should not believe. I won't discuss in this post where the threshold t should be set, and why; all that matters is that it exists somewhere.
[We could consider more complicated decision theories, e.g. a range of probability for which either stance is permissible, or belief for-purpose-X but withholding judgment for-purpose-Y. I think that making things more complicated is unlikely to change the final conclusion much, so let's keep things simple.]
(a)(i) Let us start by considering the case (a)(i), when the argument is about me and my own confusion, but I nevertheless think I am AFTAFC-justified in believing in Christianity. By ATAFC-justified, I mean that I would be rationally required to believe when taking into account all arguments except the AfC itself.
(This of course, includes on the one hand the positive arguments for Christianity; on the other hand, all other arguments against Christianity, including that portion of the AfE that doesn't intersect with the AfC).
Now, what should I conclude in this case? Unless perhaps I am very close to the threshold credence t—it seems to me that the AfC shouldn't make much difference at all in this case. After all, the premise, that God has left me in confusion, isn't really true if I admit that I otherwise have enough evidence to rationally compel me to believe in Christianity. In that case, the premise, that I am religiously confused, isn't sufficiently true to make a convincing argument.
Surely, the AfC isn't allowed to just exist as a circular self-fulfilling prophecy! As in: "The AfC is sound because the AfC is sound because the AfC is sound..." It can only be valid if it is based, non-circularly, on some other reason to disbelieve, other than the AfC itself. But by stipulation, this is not true in case (a)(i).
The only way I can see that the AfC would still work in this scenario, is if I believe something much stronger about God's actions, than simply that God should give me enough evidence to rationally warrant belief. I would need to believe that God is obligated to make me even more certain than this. In other words, I would need to believe something like the following objection:
Obj 1. God is not allowed to place me in a situation where I have to exercise the virtue of faith.
That is of trusting in God, even in the face of whatever psychological uncertainty remains. And in this case, everyone should concede that such faith would be a virtue, since we are stipulating that AFTAFC there is sufficient evidence to require me to rationally believe in God. (In particular, not believing would be morally wrong, again AFTAFC itself.) But this assumption is quite implausible. Especially if we are considering a religion like Christianity, which claims that faith is one of the most important theological virtues and something that brings us closer to God.
It follows that we can drop the assumption AFTAFC. In this scenario, faith is simply rationally justified, and the premise of the AfC is simply invalid.
(a)(ii) Now let us consider the scenario where I think I am not AFTAFC-justified in believing in Christianity. In this case, the premise of the AfC now appears to be correct, but now it doesn't seem to be doing any useful work. That is, by stipulation I already have a good reason not to believe. Adding the AfC doesn't change this, so it doesn't change my decision to disbelieve.
You might think, well it at least gives me an additional reason to disbelieve, so as a result I can be more fully confident in my disbelief. But a moment's reflection shows that this isn't really true in any sense that matters for decision making. Suppose that on some grounds g, I disbelieve in Christianity, and then I try to take comfort in that fact that even if g ends up being incorrect, the AfC still works. Well, but if I ever lose my confidence in g, that again will retrospectively invalidate the AfC, putting me back in situation (a)(i)! After all, I would be discovering that I was wrong, and that I do in fact have sufficient rational evidence to believe.
OK, but could I make an argument about how God should have revealed himself to me at an earlier time in my life, while I still thought that the reasons g were good? But that won't fly, unless I believe that:
Obj 2. God is not allowed to wait for the most opportune time to reveal himself to a person.
But this objection also seems highly implausible. Human life is a chronological thing, in which we develop our capacities progressively over time, starting off as a baby who can hardly do anything. And anyone who eventually comes into a relationship with God, has by definition resolved their confusion sufficiently to obtain this relationship. See the discussion here on Just Thomism (especially the 1st comment by St. Brandon).
Furthermore, if salvation implies that we get to live forever with God in the next life, then we get this benefit even if we have a deathbed conversion. Furthermore, the period of time when we were living apart from God, might well have served some sort of educational or other purpose—and by stipulation, it has culminated in coming to see that (AFTAFC) it is rational to believe in God. So in this case again, the AfC should have very little force.
Because of this chronological consideration, I cannot even take the AfC as an additional reason to think it is unlikely that my grounds g for disbelieving in God will later be removed by divine action! Because, if they are removed, that would retrospectively invalidate the AfC, making the scenario no less plausible than it would have been otherwise.
Now when we turn to case (b), a new problem presents itself. Specifically, it is very hard for us to know the spiritual state of another human being. For me to look at another person and judge them by saying Deep down, this person secretly knows that God exists but he is intellectually dishonest, and thus suppresses the truth in his heart vs. This other person is totally honest and not resistant to God's grace, is something very difficult for human beings to know (except perhaps in a few, very rare cases, where the behavior of the other person makes it totally obvious). And Christianity itself, at the very least strongly discourages us from judging other people in this way. As if we ourselves could look into their hearts the way that God can.
Furthermore, Christianity also says that we are all sinners, making it clear that no human but Jesus was completely non-resistant to God's grace. So, the category of human adults who are totally non-resistant to God's grace is presumably the empty set.
Nevertheless, we can still abstractly consider the 2 possible cases:
(b)(i) The argument involves other people, and they are rationally obliged to believe in God—they just irrationally (and perhaps culpably) don't do so. This case is thus resolved the same way as (a)(i). By definition these people aren't sufficiently confused here, they are making a willful decision not to believe in God even though they have enough evidence. Only if you buy something like Obj 1, is the AfC convincing in this case.
To be sure, this isn't the end of the story for people in this class. "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Rom 3:23), and resisting grace is indeed one of the ways that this sin manifests, both in the lives of non-Christians and Christians. But, "Christ came into the world to save sinners" (1 Tim 1:15). Most Christians have stories about how once they were once running away from God, but God came and saved them anyway.
So, I am not saying that all such individuals will be condemned in the end. My point is only that, by the definition of class (b)(i), their present disbelief is their own fault and choice. So it has an adequate moral explanation, in terms of human freedom.
It is certainly true that God could have appeared with such dramatic and undeniable miracles so as to force everyone to believe. But apparently he doesn't (yet) want to do that. St. Pascal wrote somewhere that God,
...wishing to appear openly to those who seek him with all their heart, and hidden from those who shun him with all their heart, he has qualified our knowledge of him by giving signs which can be seen by those who seek him and not by those who do not. There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.
Pascal thought that God hid himself in order to condemn those who were unworthy of his mercy. But in my view, on the contrary, God hiding himself from those who don't want to believe in him is itself an act of mercy and compassion.
If God revealed his holiness to us with total clarity, our only choices would be to accept him as he is, or rebel like Satan and become utterly wicked. But instead God gives us enough space that we don't have to believe, in this life. (The same applies, of course, to the various ways in which Christians are still faithless—the point here isn't just about atheists.) This allows even atheists to still seek out a good life in earthly terms, one that still allows for the pursuit of ideals like truth and justice and benevolence. Perhaps eventually, some day, they will come to realize how these qualities point to God. But in the meantime, they don't have to think of themselves as rebels defying God. Instead they can live what they think of as a normal human life, in friendship with other people, trying to follow whatever they perceive as good.
So, if God gives to people who really don't want to believe in him, sufficient space to live their lives without such belief, I don't feel that such people are in a position to complain. They are getting what they wanted! And—conditional on them not wanting to believe—it is quite plausibly spiritually better for them than the alternative (being forced to believe by overwhelming evidence) would be, as I don't think this is the sort of belief that God is looking for.
(b)(ii) The argument involves other people, and they do not in fact have sufficient evidence to rationally believe in God.
Except in some cases involving young children, and/or people-groups who have never heard the gospel, it is difficult to know for sure who belongs to this category. But I don't doubt that there are some people in it.
A person might then without logical absurdity say, well I myself have AFTAFC-justified belief, but I see that other people do not have enough evidence to believe. And all things considered, I think that tells against Christianity enough that—by taking into consideration the AfC—in the end, I don't believe. Thus, here at last we have a case where the AfC could logically have some force.
But I don't think it is a lot of force. The reason is simple: how are we in a position know that God will not form a saving relationship with such persons at some time in the future? If we have good reason to think a benevolent God would always do so, why then that is a good argument that he will. We simply aren't in a position to know that he won't. If the main obstruction to a person's relationship with God, is simply a lack of evidence, then we have every reason to believe that (when Christ eventually makes his reign obvious, through his Second Coming in glory) this lack will eventually be remedied.
So again, this is only a problem if we think that 1) there are intellectually honest people who sincerely would want to seek God, but 2) they do not have enough evidence to rationally believe, and yet 3) God will never reach out to them in the future. I can see how we might come to believe (1) or even (2) about someone specific, but how could we ever come to be confident in (3), which involves a blanket statement about all future time?
We might be in such a position to know (3) with high probability, if we additionally subscribe to the following doctrines about salvation, commonly held by many Evangelicals:
Doct I. It is impossible for any adult to be saved, without an explicit and conscious faith in Christ, of a sort that (apart from rare cases, like e.g. last-minute deathbed conversions) is usually clearly observable from the outside.
Doct II. This faith must come before death; there is no possible chance to be saved after death. All those who die without such faith necessarily go to Hell.
I do, in fact, concede that doctrines (I) and (II) would together make the AfC very concerning, as it does seem to be an empirical fact that the majority of people on Earth are not saved if (I) and (II) are the criteria. But I don't believe that the Bible in fact teaches these doctrines, when it is properly understood.
In particular, (I) implies that we are often in a position to negatively judge the spiritual state of (those who are not in any obvious way) Christians. But the Bible specifically says we aren't in a good position to judge other people's hearts: "Who are you to judge another man's servant? By his own master he will stand or fall." (Romans 14:4). In some cases I think we can be reasonably confident in a positive view of another Christian's salvation, but in this life I don't think we can ever look at a non-Christian and say, God has given up on this person.
Secondly, there is surprisingly little support for (II) in the Bible, and some passages (such as 1 Peter 3:18-4:6) appear to say the opposite.
My view is that, while salvation does come through faith in Christ, we should reject (I) and (II) in the specific forms that they are stated above. Then it seems like the AfC is only a major concern if we have something like the following objection:
Obj 3. God has to reveal himself to everyone (of a given generation, I suppose) at the same time. He isn't allowed to reveal himself to humans in some particular order, so that some persons have sufficient reason to believe before other persons do.
But I also don't see a good reason to subscribe to this. Why should it be true? Revealing himself to some people before others, would be fully compatible even with a Universalist scenario where all are eventually saved! (Indeed, the very notion of "generations" already implies that some people come to God before others are even born.)
It will be noted that all three of Obj 1-3 involve thinking we know better than God how to construct a world, and that he is obligated to conform to our expectations. But a God who has to conform to our expectations isn't a God at all. In fact, the notion of a crucified Messiah, the central paradox of Christianity, would not even be possible in a world with no religious confusion! If there were no such thing as religious confusion, there could be no Christianity!
Furthermore, by revealing himself first to the prophets and apostles, who in turn evangelize others, God makes Christians into a community (the Church). This is a great good, that would not so obviously occur if we all received our understanding from God in a direct way from heaven, that was totally disconnected with the witness of others.
Speaking of witnessing, if it is our Christian responsibility to share the good news, and make it credible by our lives, then it seems inevitable that our (many) failures to do so will result there being some people who don't yet have good reasons to believe. You could imagine God making a world where our actions couldn't affect anyone else spiritually, but I don't think such a world would be better than the one we live in. (Indeed it would be less of a "world", in the sense of a system of interacting persons and things...)
Again, this is not the end of the story. But it is a reason for things not to be 100% clear right here and now.
To summarize: If there is enough evidence for me to rationally believe, the Argument from Confusion is unsound and thus should be rejected. But if there isn't enough evidence for me to rationally believe, the argument is redundant with my other reasons to disbelieve, and thus serves no purpose.
Or suppose I think there is enough evidence for me, but not enough evidence for other people. In this case, the Argument from Confusion only speaks against Christianity if I put myself in a role of a judge and say that I know who is intellectually honest, and I also put myself in the role of a prophet and say that I know that God will nevertheless reject such people. But in fact, I am not in a good position to know that God does indeed ultimately reject such people! Instead, I should pay attention to the insight that I do have, and follow it as best I can. Without getting sidetracked by saying to God: "What about this other person?" Why should God reveal to me his plans about somebody else? What matters is if I myself have enough light to come to Christ.
Therefore, in none of these configurations is the AfC particularly convincing. And of course, if the subcases (a) and (b) are unconvincing when considered separately, they will also be unconvincing when combined together into a single argument.
There are arguments from psychology as well. Have you read Julian Jaynes? He gives an account of how religions came about. The key thing, that I also felt from childhood, that gods were present once but are no longer.
Why do we pray? Because gods are absent. Why did people ever take recourse to omens and divination? Again because gods were silent.
Jaynes says that before 1000 BC or so, people were not self-conscious in the sense we are. And whenever they needed to make a decision that caused them some stress, they would hallucinate voices telling them what to do. Just as it is written scores of times in Iliad and in other ancient books. The Hindu Vedas were heard by the ancient rishis. Or like the Hebrew prophets.
Objections from physics are trivial essentially--because physics can not speak on creation. But objections from psychology are far stronger. I am not claiming that Jaynes is right but something even queerer must be true.
Mactoul,
I haven't read Jayne's book but I've read this critical review on Astral Codex Ten.
The obvious alternative to Jaynes' theory is that people who lived before 1000 BC had basically same type of consciousness as we do. And that while a pagan of a particular sort might well have attributed e.g. their own strong emotions to the associated god, this is not really a radically different consciousness from our own, but only the (now banal) observation that much of the human mind is unconscious, and we don't always know where our own thoughts and feelings come from. Modern Westerners also don't always understand why we get angry or lustful, we just don't attribute this stuff to the gods of war and love. But if we believed that such gods existed, we probably would!
I am particularly skeptical of attempts to justify this theory by looking at Homer, who is obviously composing a fictional account (one which is already pretty sophisticated in literary terms---for example he assumes the audience is already familiar with the basic outline of the Trojan War, so he starts and ends in the middle in order to focus on the development of a particular character.) What it definitely is not, is direct testimony by the friends of Achilles or any such thing. Of course, human beings who lives before 1000 BC also made up fictional stories about the gods, for much the same reasons as people who lived after 1000 BC did, and much as modern pepple do (see e.g. the Marvel multiverse).
This theory is not, in fact, queerer than Jaynes' view. It is the default obvious view, and I don't see much good reason to give it up. In general, I think the belief that ancient human beings were mostly like us (albeit with very different cultures and religious views) is a more fruitful way to read ancient literature. Assuming that their psychology was radically different from our own, is like trying to solve for 2 unknown variables with a single equation.
The Scott Alexander review, which most people bring up, is very weak tea. Alexander specifically says he would talk, not about the actual book that Jaynes wrote but a book he wishes Jaynes wrote instead. And then he goes on and on about Theory of Mind, a term that Jaynes never uses.
I recommend David Stove's review which is excellent read in itself and gets to the fundamental point that Jaynes attempts to unify a great deal of things and tries to appreciate religion and ancient people in their own terms as secular liberal people almost never do. See, for instance, you can't bring yourself to say that Homer was being literal when he says about Achilles hearing gods.
It is not only Homer. You have to disbelieve in all ancient sources. The evidence is stark. They conversed with gods, they saw gods. We don't. That's why we pray to gods for they are absent and have been absent for 3000 years.
You may have read that primitive people, in very recent times, have been known to have conversed with gods. Is it not an evidence for a different psychology.
" human beings who lives before 1000 BC also made up fictional stories about the gods, "
People who are serious about their gods do not make fictional stories about their gods. It is like you making fictional stories about Jesus or American presidents.
Mactoul,
Your comments are making me think that maybe you haven't read Homer? I may not have read Jaynes, but I've read and studied Homer, and I don't see how the "bicameral mind" theory makes any sense as an explanation for what the gods do in e.g. the Illiad. The gods don't just whisper in people's ears, they sometimes even show up on the battlefield with physical bodies to fight.
For example, Aprhrodite, the goddess of love, decides to disguise herself as a combatant so she can go onto the battlefield. The Achaean hero Diomedes pokes her with a spear, and she runs away shrieking to Mount Olympus, to the lap of her father Zeus, who comforts her thinking that she must have been caught in an affair again. Diomedes also stabs Ares, the god of war, in the same battle, and he also runs away screaming! Homer is, famously, not at all respectful when it comes to the gods. The account is clearly fictional. It is not as if any of the humans were present on Mount Olympus to witness the dialogue between Aphrodite and Zeus, for instance.
Even if Homer somehow believed that the stories he composed were literally true, he is still telling myths about great heroes who lived many generations before him, and the stories are manifestly larger-than-life epic fantasies. For example, he talks about somebody lifting a rock and says that no 2 men who lived "today" could lift it. So Homer simply isn't talking about everyday life as an ancient person. (The only god that speaks to Homer himself is the Muse, and that's about inspiring the poetry itself.)
Almost a millenium later, Virgil goes on to write another epic poem, in which the gods also speak to Aeneas and others. The myth of Cupid and Psyche, which involves a mortal marrying a god, was composed by the novelist Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis in the 2nd century AD. So it is simply not true that all stories about gods in Western Europe, date to prior to c. 1000 BC. And it is simply not true that no pagans wrote knowingly fictional stories about the gods speaking to people.
(Also, my understanding is that Jaynes' analysis of Homer rests on supposed scholarly views which dates different parts of Homer to very different time periods, which I regard as totally speculative. Anything which rests on that foundation is even more speculative. For example, I believe that the Illiad and Odyssey were probably composed orally by the same ancient poet.)
I have read Iliad though in English translation and I admit the idea that gods were actually speaking to people didn't occur to me.
But consider Hindu Vedas--very serious non-fictional books but filled with speaking gods.
Or consider the fact that many religions and religious or philosophical figures sprouted roughly in what is called Axial age. Gautama Buddha, Mahavir Jain, Zoroaster, Confucius, Laozi, Socrates, Plato and Hebrew prophets -- all around 400-600 BC.
Jaynes gives many examples from Americas--Maya, Inca and other cultures.
My point is not that Jaynes is correct but something even queerer than this is likely than something quite banal.
I've often thought of the AfC as an argument for epistemic humility. A quick sketch: I might think I have good rational reasons to believe in Christianity. But a lot of other people seem to have good rational reasons for holding very different (and often contradictory) religious beliefs. The lack of consensus suggests that maybe my reasoning wasn't as good as I thought it was (even if I can't myself see what the problems might be), and so I should be less confident that I do in fact have good rational reasons to believe in Christianity. If nothing else, the lack of religious consensus suggests that, a lot of the time, the mechanisms by which we form religious beliefs are likely extremely error-prone, or at least do not reliably track the truth.
I recently read about a curious argument for atheism --the Tagemark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis.
It is put into terms that seem nonsense to me--I just read a short summary at Scott Alexander's.
"All mathematical objects exist" (but exist where?).
"Some mathematical objects are conscious" (Seems a deep confusion here--don't mathematical objects exist in a mathematical space and physical objects in a physical space and who knows where consciousness exists).
But many physicists seem to equivocate on the idea that physical objects and mathematical objects exist in the same space or mathematical objects give rise to physical objects. Such as the laws of physics generating universe. A nonsense in my opinion but seems widely believed among people who should know better.
Andrew2,
An interesting point. But I don't think that the argument you mention belongs to the same genus as the AfC I mentioned. While both arguments have the same minor premise: "Humans are religiously confused", their major premises are very different. (It is unfortunate that these arguments are all named after their minor premises, since it is more the major premise of an argument that more determines its nature.)
As I defined it, the AfC is a special case of the Argument from Evil. As such, the other premise of the AfC is "If God exists, he would not allow humans to be religiously confused". This is a theological argument that requires predicting what God would, or would not, do. Whereas your argument involves a major premise like "If human religious reasoning were reliable, then people would all come to the same religious conclusions". This is an anthropological argument, based on human epistemology, that has nothing whatsoever to do with God's actions, except insofar as those actions are the object of human reasoning. It also is not an example of the Argument from Evil.
So I don't think your AfC really belongs in the same discussion as this one (just as e.g. the Cosmological Argument needs to be kept distinct from the Argument from Design, even if they are both intended to show that the universe was created by God). Any refutation of your argument would have to proceed on completely different lines.
More substantively, while it's always good to keep in mind the possibility of human fallibility, my take on your argument is that it is stated at much too high of a level of generality to be very useful. For example, the phrase "mechanisms by which we form religious beliefs" is quite a grab-bag of diverse causes, ranging all the way from St. Paul's vision on the Damascus road, down to asking ChatGPT to summarize Hinduism in 3 sentences or less. For all your argument shows, these "mechanisms" might contain some elements which are highly reliable, along with other elements which are very unreliable. (I certainly do not think we should assume a priori that if one religion is supported by arguments of form X (e.g. historical arguments for miracles) that another religion will automatically be supported by arguments of the exact same form and of the exact same quality!)
As an analogy, suppose that I notice a friend who engages in some woo healing practice, like trying to cure cancer with magnets or something, and I notice that many other kinds of pseudo-scientific medical treatments exist. Suppose I draw the conclusion M: "The mechanisms by which human beings form medical beliefs are extremely error prone, or at least do not reliably track the truth", and then take I this as a reason to doubt that e.g. viruses can cause colds, and that regular hand-washing helps keep people from spreading germs. This would be a fallacious equivocation. The fact is that the proposition M is much too vague and general to be useful. Even though M is in fact, quite plausibly true under a certain interpretation (most cultures, at most times, have had many false beliefs about disease and healing, and no individual medical treatment is accepted as valid by everyone), it leaves out the more important truth that some items of medical knowledge are, in fact, known by highly reliable scientific fact-finding!
Sociologically, some people believe in the reliability of vaccines, while others believe that vaccines give children autism, and also lead to a net increase in disease and death. I could say "People's beliefs about vaccines are not reliable", but this doesn't tell me whether it is the medical establishment or the anti-vaxxers who are making the mistake. (In this case, it is the anti-vaxxers.) One could say many similar things about our political, economic, scientific beliefs, etc. Topics which can also be highly controversial, in many cases, even when the truth is out there to be known.
In general, knowing the reliability of a particular argument, involves inspecting the quality of that particular argument, along with closely related arguments, which are sufficiently similar to provide insight. Not by lumping an entire class of widely diverse arguments about a common subject matter, into one big bag, and then making a general judgement about the entire group. If someone asks you: "How reliable are people's beliefs about Canada?" isn't the answer always going to be: "It depends on what specific claim they are making about Canada, and their reasons for making that claim. If you want to be logical you need to concentrate more on the form of good reasoning, rather than the subject matter."