That’s often the case.

My publication pace varies based on what’s going on IRL, my other contract and work obligations, and how my research for a month’s articles is proceeding.

I always publish four substantive blogs a month. But you will notice it is often the case that most or all of those appear towards the end of the month. This month, the first should appear this or next week, and thus mid-month. But to have almost or actually a month pause in between last month’s last and the current month’s first article is not uncommon (look at, for example, May to June, February to March, and October to November, and that’s just over the past year).

That was exactly the same impression I had: An honest academic. Of course, the fact that the state of peer-reviewed literature in his field is such that even an honest academic’s work is trying to find some way to transmute honesty into dishonesty is still an indication of the bankruptcy of the field, and I still think there’s institutional issues pretty clearly shown there. The fact that the honest neocon in the analogy would arrive at a point where such a defense would make sense, and be sincere, and then be published is itself telling. But it does seem that he really did try to honestly do his work, and that usually actually suggests someone who just has not fully realized what the implication is of the fact that his defense even exists.

I don’t think Moon is insincere. I think he has come to the convoluted position he does through, ironically, exactly the opposite motive: he is trying to be totally honest.

Since there is no honest way to straightforwardly get the result most Christians want here (and which Plantinga has often been assumed to argue for), Moon ends up having to build a complicated contraption to get the closest result to it honestly achievable.

Thus, it is his honesty that has led him to this Rube Golbergesque way to at least establish some context in which circular appeals to the Holy Spirit would be valid. The reason it is so convoluted is that this is the only honest result possible.

-:-

Here is a conceptual analogy:

Imagine an honest neoconservative (rare, I know) learning that torture is a violation of the human rights even of the duly convicted; but they really want there to be some case for torture; but they are too honest to fabricate one; so they come up with an extremely elaborate and bizarre set of circumstances under which it would be ethical to use it. The result is convoluted because it has to be: that’s the only honest circumstance in which torture would be acceptable. A dishonest neoconservative might then use this honest neoconservative’s argument as a case for torture in general, glossing over that they only established its acceptability in conditions so bizarre they never actually happen in the real world (or so rarely as to be practically moot). The honest neocon is not responsible for that. They did their honest best, and did not intend their work to be thus misused. I think this is where Moon is.

Agreed.

This one is almost certainly at a confluence of two factors. Christian apologists have a vested interest in using academic jargon to disguise straightforward bad arguments, and one of their chief cons is to discuss footnotes and minutiae and angels-on-pinheads problems while acting as if every Christian actually has access to arguments and thoughts as sophisticated as they have. (Because it’s pretty obviously embarrassing, for both bad classist and good logical reasons, to have to admit that your position is held in its entirety by hucksters, uneducated people, con artists, cranks and frauds, and the only difference is the degree and type of erudition deployed in defense). Craig’s entire career is basically a long set of riffs on this, which is why it was so telling when he recently admitted that he lowered his epistemic bar for Christianity because it was such a nice story. (And then tried some really pathetic damage control).

Moon thus has a vested interest to act as if ordinary people really aren’t making straightforwardly flawed claims and arguments. (I think this is also what ruins Plantinga’s epistemology. Most people actually don’t have Christianity or most other models of theism as anything like a properly basic belief, even within their worldview. They may not realize it, but their beliefs are derived from other conclusions or heuristics, like trust in family, a sense of intuition, a sense that there has to be a Creator without recognizing that the Creator need not be anything like their very specific one, etc.)

At the same time, Moon is also in the ivory tower. And so the temptation to try to steelman an average person’s defense using seemingly-sophisticated academic distinctions must be immense. I suspect that people like Moon and Plantinga may even think that they’re sort of standing up for the little guy, advocating for the good innocent member of the flock against the meanie atheist who will be punching down at them.

I like to be charitable to people and so I would like to think that in many cases it is the latter. But the hard-nosed institutional analyst in me tells me that the latter really only exists because of the former. The ivory tower exists, in this tiny context, precisely to let bad ideas have a pseudo-intellectual gloss. Their segment of academia could probably publish Lorem Ipsum papers at this point because they’re really not going to be convincing anyone but each other, and even then only of tiny minutiae.

I’m curious about your read on Moon specifically here (i.e. is his disconnect from the average person who calls into the ACA and offers as an honest reason to believe an argument riddled with obvious fallacies a more innocent result of being an ivory tower person or a less innocent result of being an apologist for whom it is useful to try to sweep those people under the rug), but it really doesn’t matter too much. The net result is more squid ink.

That’s a good point. I wasn’t thinking from the perspective of “versions” of Moon-like arguments on the street as it were. But that is true: Moon can sound like he is defending those arguments, when in fact he is not. The convoluted structure of his argument can conceal this point from less discerning readers.

Had Moon taken that into consideration he might have noticed my point by that pathway as well: when you model a real-world exchange like that, it goes, Christian: “I feel the Holy Spirit therefore everything I believe is true”; Skeptic: “People who trust their feelings like that usually end up with false beliefs, e.g. Islam, Hinduism, Paganism, Judaism, Mormonism, Shakerism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostalism, every cult ever, etc.), therefore your belief is as probably false as they are.”

Moon cannot rescue the Christian from this exchange, because the argument is de facto, not de jure; and because the Christian in this position is not isolated from any other de facto reasons to question their faith either (as Moon’s argument also requires); and because this is a challenge to the entire original justification of this Christian’s beliefs (they aren’t citing any other evidence than reliance on this method of “feelings entail facts”), and Moon’s argument requires their belief to have been prima facie justified. The skeptic is directly attacking their original justification, not proposing a mere external defeater to an otherwise-justified belief.

These are all the convolutions in Moon’s argument it would be easy to overlook the relevance of. And this is why ivory cloud arguments like this are a problem. It isn’t being brought back down to any real-world situation.

I would note that I also think that most average Christians on the street aren’t actually making the kind of arguments Moon rescues them from. I think that, in most cases, they’re saying things like “I know my feelings, when they really are strong and consistent, are good guides” or “I trust my intuition”. And in most cases, theists in general are making profoundly strong arguments about certainty about specific historical events or the nature of the cosmos. They’re also often even making strong arguments about having properly understood a written text, even if a moment’s thought would point out both that such texts are inherently not trivial to interpret and that they are reading texts that have been transmitted non-inerrantly over centuries or even millennia.

In all those contexts, “You could be wrong” is perfectly reasonable as long as the “You could be wrong” argument is not something totally unevidenced like “You could be a lizard person or a brain in a jar” but something very well evidenced like “Your feelings could have misled you, a thing that happens with regularity” or “Your intuition could have been unreliable, a thing that happens”.

In those contexts, what often happens is that, to argue a fortiori, critics of the position are pointing out that, even if a person thinks that their feelings are overwhelmingly reliable or their intuitions are overwhelmingly accurate, they’re not 100% accurate or even close. And yet to arrive at the conclusions that theists do, with the strength that they do, would actually effectively require 100% accurate instruments of detection.

(Which is, in Bayesian terms, just stating the point that the evidence is incredibly weak in terms of clarity and amount for the claim at hand, and so it needs to be wholly reliable to even have a shot at being reasonable).

I suspect Moon’s argument is wholly impotent against this kind of reliability argument, which is the kind of argument anyone would make about any claim in science or history or anywhere else.