The difference between showing a belief to be irrational and showing that God does not exist

On the top of 7, Plantinga distinguishes positive arguments for thinking God does not exist from showing belief in God to be irrational. I already addressed this issue in an earlier post, but there are some things that worry me. Given the present debate and the number of arguments in the theistic arsenal, it's not entirely clear that if atheists have responses to each argument, that belief in God becomes irrational. As I have noted before, two different philosophers can hold contradictory views and supply much evidence for them and both can still be rational in holding to their views. I develop this in depth in my dissertation. Given the power of the theistic arguments and disagreements over whether atheists have adequately responded to something like the kalam cosmological argument, I don't think we are in the land of rationally or irrationality when the discussion occurs among talented philosophers. I think the most brilliant theist and the most brilliant atheist can be rational in holding to their views. (I won't go into the reasons.) But suppose the atheist has shown that belief in God is irrational (in my last post I noted problems interpreting this claim). Are they then licenced to conclude that God doesn't exist. If so, then the burden is on the theist. In fact, the atheist need not give arguments for thinking God does not exist since if they show that each of our arguments fail and the burden of proof is on us, they have won.
My question is whether this is right. How can we show that both bear a burden and thus the atheist must show God doesn't exist instead of playing defense and attacking theistic arguments? (The preceding may be nonsense, but the question is still important.)

Belief in God as irrational

I would like to pick up on an idea I developed in the very first post: if the atheist shows that belief that God exists is irrational, what exactly has he shown? The obvious answer seems to be that 1) if belief that God exists is irrational, then any present person who instantiates such a belief is irrational. One could make a stronger claim: 2) anyone in the past or present that has instantiated the belief is irrational. Stronger still: 3) anyone in the past, present, or future who instantiates the belief is irrational. I think as the numbers increase, one's justification for believing the proposition associated with numbers decreases.
Consider 1): whether this claim is true will hinge on some other issues, such as satisfying the total evidence requirement (taking in all the relevant data) and whether the intellectual capacities of the person are relevant to justified belief. First, the arguments against God's existence are not inescapable. The more sophisticated forms of the problem of evil were discovered recently by accomplished philosophers. Before then, they were dealing with the old problem which claimed that God and evil can't coexist. So if it took their minds to discover the new problem, how can we expect the average individual who actually dwells on these issues to come up with the new problem on their own? Apparently then, the issue depends on how accessible the arguments are assuming the person is continually seeking information on the problem of evil - anything which could serve as evidence one way or the other. Obviously there are places in the world where people don't have access to the best incarnations of the arguments against the existence of God. Nor is it reasonable to suspect that if they are continually searching for evidence dealing with the problem of evil, they will somehow discover the new problem of evil. Thus, assuming that the person satisfies the normal demands on justified belief and is intellectually virtuous, their belief in God is justified. Therefore, if the claim "belief that God exists is irrational" means that all present instantiations of the belief is irrational, then the claim is probably false. We can run the same argument more effectively for proposition 2). Thus, if the claim "belief that God exists is irrational" means 2), then there is a greater probability that the claim is false. Finally, for 3), the epistemic problem is knowledge of our own fallibility and the continued revision or abandonment of philosophical theories over time. Keeping our own fallibility in mind and our inability to consider every possible legitimate point for the problem of evil, one can't justifiably think we have said the last word. Thus, the part of 3) which refers to the future theist does not have a very high probability - at least not enough to justifiably compel a strong belief. Also, suppose there aren't any bright theists around at the moment - no philosophers who are theists and no competent theologians to deal with the issue. Clearly, the atheist would have less justification for thinking he has shown 3). But I suspect when atheists deny that belief in God is rational, they are assuming the opposite: there are a few philosophers who can make the debate somewhat competitive.

So then, what could the claim "belief that God exists is irrational" justifiably mean? I suspect it must mean the following: belief that God exists is irrational for those who are aware of the best arguments for and against God existence, and for those who could be aware of those arguments with a reasonable amount of mental application or research. There is another possibility but I think it is irrelevant in the end. Suppose a well published and well known philosopher attends your church and has taught on the arguments for and against God's existence. In fact, he is considered one of the best minds on the topic. You follow the arguments but are not sure what to believe because you know that other very intelligent philosophers disagree. From the point of view of getting justified belief based on the testimony of the member of your church, I don't see how you could be justified in believing that he is right while others are mistaken.

Here is a bigger problem. All of the above reasoning cuts both ways. The atheist could use it to argue that it is not true for all people that belief that God doesn't exist is irrational. But I suspect we want to say that this belief is irrational, especially in light of Romans 1.

What do you think? I am just throwing these thoughts out there so there are probably several places where I am mistaken. Also, I can think of a few objections myself which may jeopardize my theory of justification.

Reply to Theophilus on pages 2 and 3

Good point. You have uncovered a further debate between those who believe sensory experience constitutes the best evidence one can have and philosophers like myself who think sense experience is only evidence in a derivative sense.
Here is your argument, as I see it:
"Tony's argument compares two similar cases: bad reasoning about God and bad reasoning about Bush. He shows that in the Bush case, because the reasoning is invalid, one is not justified in denying that Bush is president. He believes the God case is sufficiently similar so that if one is not justified in denying that Bush is president as the result of bad reasoning, one is not justified in denying God exists as the result of bad reasoning. But he misses an important difference: the Bush case involves the possibility of verifying the conclusion with sensory experience whereas the God case doesn't. Since we have a sensory route to determine that Bush is president, then we ought to suspend judgment in the Bush case. But since we can't verify through the senses that God exists, we are justified in going further and concluding God does not exist."
I think this is an important argument and reveals fundamental issues.
There are several routes I could take in response.

1) I could first show that our knowledge via sensory experience is subject to skeptical concerns and thus our knowledge of the physical world is no better than our knowledge of the world of abstract unseen entities like numbers, the laws of math and logic, and some other things. I particularly like this approach since it shows that ultimately science rests on philosophical assumptions which it cannot prove using the methods of science.
However, the person on the street is unlikely to be persuaded by this argument.
2) I can argue that we do have sensory evidence for thinking God exists. We don't perceive God but we perceive the work of his hands (the improbability that the world would evolve to support life, that the only way to think our cognitive faculties are designed to discover truths is to assume God's existence because evolution does not care about truth but only survival and reproductive success, there must be a beginning to the universe because matter can't be eternal, etc.). Similarly, I have never actually seen Bush. I have only seen representations of Bush via photos and video cameras. They don't give me direct visual access to Bush in the way that standing in front of him at arms length in good lighting may. So I infer his existence from evidence, not from direct access to him. But I could argue that the same is the case for God. So in one sense, the nature of the evidence is the same; its the quality of the evidence which is in dispute.
One might reply that in the Bush case, we could still see him by standing in front of him and thus bypass seeing him via cameras, but with God we can't do that. At this point, we must focus on the 'can' used in the prior sentence. We can see God in the sense that it is logically (and a we would argue, physically) possible for God to show himself to us using his voice, or light which emanates from his presence, or taking on the appearance of someone (a majestic old man with white hair and a beard). But one could say, "But you don't actually see God himself; you only see the effects of his presence." But I could say the same about Bush. We never truly see Bush himself since light bounces off Bush, transmits information to the retina, which is then passed on to the brain ultimately producing an image of Bush in the mind. We never actually see the man himself given the way perception works. So it is logically possible for us to see both Bush and God in the relevant sense and physically possible as well (as far as I can tell). And suppose that we actually do see the surface of Bush: his clothes, face, hands etc. All we really see are colors and shapes, and Bush is not identical with any of these. We only see one side of Bush at a time and not all of him. So we still must infer his existence from the sensory evidence.
3) I think what your argument is ultimately hinting at is that when it comes to God, the absence of evidence for God's existence is enough to warrant the belief God doesn't exist, whereas, in the case of Bush, the absence of evidence only warrants the suspension of judgment. The same is true of unicorns, one could claim. In the absence of reasons for thinking unicorns exist, we are justified in believing they don't.
First, I don't think atheists or agnostics are justified in thinking unicorns don't exist. They are only justified in thinking unicorns don't exist in the parts of the universe which have been discovered. We are told the universe is infinite (or constantly expanding). What justifies us in thinking that from our minuscule knowledge of a small portion of the universe, we can make a legitimate inference about the whole of it. A child might as well argue that since he and his friend have a bed in the shape of a car, all children must have a bed in the shape of a car. In fact, the inference in the unicorn case is much worse, since we could conceivably check all the children whereas we can't check every corner of the universe. Also, in the case of the kid, one would only need one example of a child without a car shaped bed to disprove the claim that all kids have car shaped beds. But to disprove the unicorn case, one actually needs to search at least half the universe before one can rightly make a conclusion. This is a problem that atheists have recognized: they must show a universal negative - there are no divine beings whatsoever.
So only the christian who has access to God's mind may have a good reason to think unicorns don't exist because God has not told us they do, and it seems he would mention the possibility of such strange beings.
Also, suppose our astrologist uses astrology to argue that numbers or the laws of logic exist. We can't see either of these things. Despite this fact, we would not be entitled to conclude that they don't exist from bad astrological reasoning. But one could argue that in the case of math and logic, we do have evidence for thinking these abstract entities exist (although some philosophers argue vehemently that math and logical entities are not abstract but are like scientific laws which capture generalizations about the physical world. Needless to say, the view runs into difficulties.). True, there is evidence for thinking abstract numbers and logical laws exist and some evidence to think they don't. But the same is true in the case of God. I think only someone deeply biased would say there is no shred of evidence whatsoever for thinking God's exists. Such a person either has not read the argument's for God's existence (which taken as a whole, make up a collage of good evidence) or is simply refusing to recognize that the arguments for God's existence have something to be said for them. In the former case, the person shouldn't be make any claims whatsoever on the presence or absence of evidence for God's existence, and in the latter case, all we can do for them is pray.

From Theophilus

Forgive me if I state things that you have specifically addressed, but if theists are shown that they do not have good reasons for believing in God, and that they have irrational beliefs, then why does this not entitle someone to say that God does not exist? With the hermit example that you provided, in my mind President Bush is a tangible figure that can be seen and is not analogous to a person, or spirit being like God (I wholeheartedly admit that I could be way off track). Even though the hermit has wrongly come to believe that George Bush has become president based upon astrology, President Bush can be pointed to and seen. One can say, "Look, do you see President Bush?" This is not the case with God. All we have are reasons to believe and our experiences, which are included in the reasons. It is the same with the atheists. They have reasons not to believe as well as a lack of experience.

Pages 2 and 3

Some comments on the bottom of 2 and top of 3:
I think Plantinga wrongly conflates reasons for thinking God does not exist with arguments against the rationality of theistic belief. Just because I show one's belief to be irrational, I am not entitled to conclude the belief is mistaken. Suppose a hermit with no exposure to the outside world believes George Bush is president based on astrology. Now clearly his belief is irrational even though the belief happens to be true – George Bush is president. So consider (1): showing that the arguments for God's existence do not work or make more reasonable belief in God. Let's say one shows that the present arguments for God's existence fail and thus theists don't have good reasons for believing that God exists, making belief in God irrational. He is then not entitled to infer that God does not exist. He has only shown that the reasons given don't support the conclusion. Such was the case in the George Bush argument; we weren't entitled to infer George Bush is not president. In other words, if your focus is (1) then you only have justification to suspend judgment. This is why most atheists are as irrational as theists since they can't offer good arguments for thinking God does not exist. And this is precisely what is required to be a rational atheist. One must accomplish (2): give good arguments for thinking God does not exist. Until one can accomplish (2) the only permissible stance is agnosticism. But Plantinga conflates one and two. He seems to suggest if you have done one, you have done the other. But the atheist must accomplish one and two, not just one or the other.
Some atheists would object to the above because they believe the default rational position is atheism just as the default rational position is to believe unicorns don't exist. The burden of proof, they say, is on the theist. But I think this is mistaken as does Plantinga in one of his articles.
A second problem with pgs. 2 and 3: even if a philosopher shows that the belief that P is irrational, it does not follow that before your were irrational, nor does it follow that you are presently irrational in believing P. For instance, imagine we are investigating a murder and all evidence points to John. He has a motive, he was last seen with the victim shouting that he would kill him, his fingerprints are all over the murder weapon, his DNA is all over the place and his blood is on the victim. Finally, he was found hovering over the victim with the knife in his hand. At this point we would be rational in believing that most likely John killed the victim. But suppose later we come upon very good evidence that he was set up. Then our belief that John did it would no longer be rational; but it was rational before. Consequently, I doubt an atheist can show that the best Christian philosophers have always irrationally believed that God exists. Having a rational belief does not guarantee that the belief is true. Rather, it makes it more likely that the belief is true. Case in point: the above murder scenario. Scientists and mathematicians have held many rational beliefs which turned out to be false in the end because of some new unforeseen discovery. Secondly, if an atheist shows that there aren't good reasons for thinking God exists, it does not follow that every person's theistic belief is irrational. Suppose John lives in the middle ages and is the prized pupil of Thomas Aquinas. He specializes in arguments for and against God's existence. But the more nuanced present day arguments against God's existence never occur to him despite his constant mental exertion on this topic. Clearly, relative to the evidence he has and given his continued search for evidence, he is justified in his belief that God exists.