Defeaters Volume 13 Mp3 Download
Leanna Perr
This article first appeared in the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL, volume 39, number 05 (2016). The full text of this article in PDF format can be obtained by clicking here. For further information or to subscribe to the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL go to: -research-journal/
Hinduism and Buddhism have convinced tens of millions of people over centuries that human beings survive the grave. They neither cease to exist nor await a restitution of their physical bodies once for all at the resurrection of the dead. Rather, our good and bad deeds produce good and bad outcomes (karma).
I argue that reincarnation and karma, while appealing on the surface, are riddled by deep intellectual flaws. Neither Hinduism nor Buddhism affirms the existence of a personal creator and designer. Therefore, their accounts of karma and reincarnation cannot rely on such concepts. This leaves them bereft of a key conceptual element of their view. Karma is seen as an impersonal law that somehow records good and bad deeds and assigns karmic outcomes from one lifetime to another. Yet the notion of moral evaluation and the assignment of karmic outcomes through reincarnation is rational only if a personal and moral evaluator and agent is the fulcrum of the system. But the very idea of karma is of an impersonal system.
Worse yet, for the systems of karma and reincarnation I discuss here, there is no individual self. Buddhists deny the existence of any self. Nondualists deny the existence of finite selves but affirm the existence of a universal self (Brahman). But in both cases, there is nothing on which karma can work. If there are no selves, then no self can be reincarnated as another self!
The answer to all this is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Rather than leaving us to atone for our own sins through karma, He offers salvation to us through His matchless achievements. This truth gives us true hope in this life and in the next.
The philosophies behind these beliefs differ. For Hindus, karma and reincarnation involves a disembodied entity that enters a new body on death. For Buddhists, there is no such entity (or soul) to be reincarnated. In fact, Buddhism speaks of rebirth as opposed to reincarnation, since there is nothing to be incarnated again. The self is a collection of contingent states that dissolve upon death. There is no soul to animate a new body. Nevertheless, we can test the rationality of these ancient doctrines of karma and reincarnation as one basic claim and note the differences as we progress through the arguments.
First, when we survey the vast number and kinds of injustices in the world that are never brought to justice, we call out for justice nonetheless. What of the young girl tricked into the sex trade by an international slavery association who dies while enslaved? Is that it? Is that the end of the story?
Second, reincarnation also claims to insure justice on a cosmic scale. We each get what we deserve in every life. In Eastern religions, reincarnation is connected with the law of karma, which insures that our good and bad deeds produce good and bad results from lifetime to lifetime. The goal is not to come back in a happy life but to attain enlightenment and leave the cycle entirely.
The doctrine of karma and reincarnation is a direct challenge to Christian teachings on salvation and the afterlife. God (not karma) is the moral judge of the cosmos, and no human being reincarnates but rather will be part either of the resurrection of the just (saved by grace) or of the unjust (justly condemned by their works). The rest of this article will critique these non-Christian teachings logically and offer a compelling biblical alternative.
Both Hinduism and Buddhism deny the existence of an unlimited and personal being who created, designed, and orchestrates the events of the cosmos. Both religions have their gods and goddesses, but none of them are anything like the God of the Bible. Therefore, both religions must account for their distinctive beliefs without the aid of such a being. Put another way, these religions (and all religions) must be able to support their doctrines rationally within the structure of their respective worldviews. Let us see what this means for karma.
Karma is both moral and impersonal in its nature. It is moral because karma evaluates the actions of all humans (and living things) morally and determines what kind of life each being merits after his or her death. In both Hinduism and Buddhism, karma is accrued in previous lifetimes and only applies to one lifetime at a time. Thus, one cannot build up good karma in this life and have it apply to this life, American popular religion to the contrary.
But karma does not include a moral being who evaluates the morality of actions through judgments. There is no judge and, strictly speaking, no judgments. Karma is an automatic and impersonal law. It is something like a moral law of gravity. Since Hinduism and Buddhism lack belief in a creator and designer who runs the universe, they cannot appeal to such a being to know and evaluate morality and assess the proper rewards and punishments for the next life. How then could karma make such determinations?
The doctrine of karma, however, excludes consciousness, moral knowledge, or the ability to assess moral states. This is precisely because karma is not a personal and moral knower and evaluator. Some Americans, with their hodgepodge spirituality, claim that God is in charge of karma. But this idea is found in no world religion or established philosophy. Karma is an impersonal replacement for a personal God. We can state the argument formally.
This is a deductive argument; that is, if the premises are true, the conclusions must be true. But it seems that the premises are unassailable. If so, from this argument alone, reincarnation and karma are refuted. But we are only part way down the logical road.
Hinduism came long before the Buddha began teaching the dharma (or message). Although Hinduism is varied in its teaching and is not traceable to one founder, a key idea in the nondualistic school of Hinduism is that of Brahman, or a universal self. This view has become familiar to us in America through popularizers such as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (the founder of Transcendental Meditation) and Deepak Chopra. For nondualism, there are no individual selves or distinct centers of consciousness. To consider oneself as distinct from another self or from Brahman is to be deceived, to be bewitched by maya (or illusion). The only reality is Brahman, which has no qualities at all. To say that Brahman is this or that is to misunderstand Brahman. This claim raises more than a few philosophical objections (such as how anything can exist with no qualities), but our concern is the relation of nondualism to reincarnation.
Buddhism suffers a similar problem, although its worldview differs from nondualism. For Buddhism, the self, considered as a unified substance existing over time, is a fiction. We are, rather, a collection of changing parts without a continuing essence. We are like a chariot, which is nothing but a contingent collection of parts. No part of the chariot is its essence and the parts need no essence to make up a chariot.4 Suffering is caused by trying to satisfy a self that does not exist. We must free ourselves from all desire by following the way of the Buddha and eventually leave the wheel of reincarnation.
The main goal of this article is to discuss some arguments concerning this issue. In particular, I will formulate and reject a novel (though quite natural) line of thought in favor of the view that rationality requires the concept of belief.
The entire discussion will be held in the framework of a non-psychologistic factualism about reasons for belief. So, reasons for belief (epistemic reasons) are (in general, at least) non-psychological facts or states of affairs.11 This is mostly for reasons of having a unified and convenient terminology. The main points, I believe, could be translated into other frameworks. In any case, the non-psychologistic factualist view has become popular and is currently one of the main contenders in the field.12 I will further assume that reasons for belief are provided by pieces of evidence. This excludes pragmatic reasons for belief, and it constitutes a commitment to some form of evidentialism. Again, however, this commitment need not be essential to the main points of the line of thought below. (And I suspect that proponents of reflexionism will not bark at this point.)
Now, we can start looking at the phenomenon of defeaters. As has become standard, we can distinguish between rebutting defeaters and undercutting defeaters.13 A rebutting defeater (RD) for the belief that p is a piece of evidence that speaks against the proposition p. In contrast to rebutting defeaters, undercutting defeaters (UDs) are more variegated. They know of three different species: reasons-undercutting, basing-undercutting, and possession-undercutting defeaters. In addition, there is a further notion of a generic undercutting defeater. These are to be characterized as follows.
Secondly, a basing-undercutting defeater is a bit of evidence to the effect that there is no proper basing between what is treated as a reason and the belief for which it is treated as a reason. Basing-undercutting defeater target the feature of being properly based.15
Relying on the terminological and substantive assumptions elaborated in the section above, we can now formulate the argument from undercutting defeaters. The argument is supposed to show that the capacity for responding to reasons requires the possession of the concept of belief and, simultaneously, also the possession of the concept of a reason. Our focus will be on the concept of belief, but the entire argument is actually working for both concepts, if it works at all.
If the argument succeeds, it provides some support for reflexionism (the one-level view). In addition, the argument is interesting in itself, independently of its bearing on the truth of reflexionism.
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