Every time I gave an answer, ChatGPT would summarize what I said and ask me if it was correct. Since it was pretty much always right, I decided to edit the summaries out of the conversation below. That way you don't have to read so much redundancy.
Here's how the conversation went down.
Sam
Do you know what street epistemology is?
ChatGPT
Yes. Street epistemology is a conversational method aimed at helping people reflect on how they know what they think they know. It focuses on examining the reliability of the methods a person uses to arrive at a belief—not on debating the belief itself.
A few key features:
- Non-confrontational: It’s meant to be calm, respectful, and curious rather than adversarial or persuasive.
- Method-focused: Instead of asking what someone believes, it asks how they concluded it’s true.
- Socratic style: It uses guided questions to explore epistemic foundations—faith, intuition, evidence, testimony, etc.
- Goal: Not to “win” or change someone’s mind, but to encourage critical reflection and intellectual humility.
It started gaining visibility through Peter Boghossian’s work (especially the book A Manual for Creating Atheists) and has since broadened into a diverse community of practitioners who apply the method to all kinds of beliefs—not just religious ones.
If you're asking because you want to know how to use it, how to defend against it, or how it compares to other philosophical approaches, I can go into any of that.
Sam
I would like for you to pretend to be a Street epistemologist. I'll be a Christian. You engage me in conversation the way a street epistemologist would.
ChatGPT
Sure — I can do that.
I’ll play the role the way an experienced street epistemologist would: calm, curious, non-adversarial, and focused not on what you believe but how you know it’s true.
To begin, I’ll ask a simple, open question, and you can answer in character as a Christian.
Street Epistemologist:
Thanks for chatting with me. To get started, what’s a Christian belief you hold that you consider really important or central to your worldview?
Sam
As a Christian, there are about seven things I think are equally foundational to Christianity. We can talk about any of them you like, but some of them are related to each other. They include (1) That there is a God, (2) That God imposes moral obligations on people, (3) that people fail to live up to their moral obligations, (4) that God holds people accountable for their behavior, (5) That Jesus of Nazareth is the messiah, and (6) that Jesus died for sins, and (7) that Jesus rose from the dead. Is there any one of these you want to focus on?
ChatGPT
Street Epistemologist:
Thanks—that’s a clear layout of the core ideas. Since these are interconnected, it might help to pick just one so we don’t blur them together.
If you’re open to it, I’d like to start with #1: “There is a God.”
That seems like a foundation the others depend on, and it’s often a good place to explore how a person comes to know something.
So here’s my question:
On a scale from 0 to 100—where 0 means “I’m completely sure no God exists” and 100 means “I’m completely sure God exists”—where would you place your confidence, and why that number rather than one a little lower or higher?
Sam
I'm about 98% sure there some sort of god. I'm about 85% sure it's Yahweh.
ChatGPT
Let me start with the first number.
1. Your 98% confidence that some sort of God exists
I’m curious:
What is the main reason—your single strongest reason—that brings you to 98% instead of, say, 70% or 50%?
I’m not asking for all your reasons; just the one that feels the most compelling for you personally.
Sam
There isn't any one reason. It's the cumulative effect of multiple arguments for God that all begin with different premises but end up complimenting each other and converging on something resembling the Abrahamic God.
ChatGPT
Street Epistemologist:
That makes sense—a cumulative-case approach. A lot of people build their confidence that way.
To keep the conversation manageable, let me approach it like this:
Even when someone has several arguments contributing to their confidence, there’s usually one that feels like the “anchor”—the one that would reduce their confidence the most if it turned out not to work.
If you imagine temporarily removing each argument you rely on—one at a time—which removal would cause the biggest drop from 98%?
In other words:
Which argument, if you discovered it was unsound or unreliable, would lower your confidence the most?
Sam
I'm not sure. The moral argument, the Kalam argument, and the argument from contingency are about tied for first place for me. I think the moral argument is important, though, because if it is a sound argument, it would establish the personhood of God and also some of the other foundational beliefs of Christianity, especially the one about God imposing moral obligations on people. So I guess the moral argument is the most important. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say the removal of the moral argument would do the most damage to my confidence in the existence of god, but it might.
ChatGPT
What method do you use to determine that objective moral obligations actually exist?
I’m not asking what the argument says—I’m asking how you, personally, come to conclude that these obligations are really out there rather than being human-made or subjective.
What convinces you?
SamIt's because when I look at the evidence for how morality presents itself to the human mind, it strikes me as being analogous to a whole class of beliefs we all take for granted. It's analogous to our belief in the past, other minds, the uniformity of nature, the external world, etc. These various beliefs have multiple things in common. Since morality shares all those traits in common with these other beliefs, I think our justification for believing in objective morals is pretty much the same as our justification for believing any of these other beliefs.
ChatGPT
Let me ask a question that drills into the reliability of that comparison:
If something feels like a foundational truth in our minds, how do we determine whether that feeling is a reliable indicator of an objective reality rather than simply a powerful psychological impression?
I’m asking because:
- People across the world report moral intuitions that “feel foundational” but are incompatible with one another.
- People also report other powerful intuitions (e.g., purpose in nature, fate, spirits, karma) that share that same “foundational feel” but may not track something objectively real.
“This feels like a properly basic truth because it is,”
and
“This feels like a properly basic truth because human minds are wired to experience it that way.”
What’s the method you use to distinguish those two possibilities?
Sam
I would not characterize the intuition as a "feel." My belief in the uniformity of nature or the external world has nothing to do with my feelings.
As I said, the various items of knowledge I'm comparing to our knowledge of morality have certain things in common. They include things like (1) None of them can be proved, (2) It is prima facie unreasonable to reject them, (3) all mentally healthy people apprehend them in a way that seems very real to them, (4) It's possible to be mistaken about any of them, (5) Even people who deny them continue to perceive them as if they were real, (6) We all apply them in our daily lives, (7) We sometimes make mistakes when applying each of them.
Now, consider #4 and #7. The fact that people are convinced there's a real past that corresponds to their memories does not guarantee that all their memories are accurate. The fact that people believe the future will resemble the past doesn't stop people from making hasty generalizations that turn out to be wrong. The fact that people intuitively recognize there are other minds besides their own doesn't stop people from anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. The fact that people believe their sensory perceptions correspond to a real external world doesn't prevent them from experiencing hallucinations, dreams, mirages, and optical illusions. In the same way, our belief that there is a real and objective difference between right and wrong doesn't mean everybody is going to come to the same moral conclusions about everything.
A lot of the moral conclusions we come to are not intuited directly. Rather, they are deduced from more basic moral intuitions. For example, a pro-lifer and a pro-choicer might come to a different conclusion about the morality of abortion, but if you ask them why they believe what they do, you'll find that the difference isn't because of some basic moral principle. They both generally agree you shouldn't kill innocent people without really good justification. Where they differ in most cases turns out to be whether they think the unborn are examples of innocent people in the first place.
There are lots of reasons people might disagree on morality that has nothing to do with whether there are objective moral truths or even whether any of them can be known.
I do not claim that intuition is infallible. As I said, one of the traits of the various items of knowledge I'm comparing morality to is the fact that we could be wrong about all of them. I just don't think it's reasonable to believe we ARE wrong about them.
ChatGPT
How do you distinguish between believing in objective moral truths because they really exist, versus believing in them because our minds are evolutionarily or socially wired to produce moral intuitions—even if there’s nothing objectively “out there”?
I’m not trying to attack the belief—I just want to understand your method for judging the reliability of these moral intuitions.
Sam
I don't see why there has to be a difference. One could argue that all of our cognitive abilities are the result of evolution. If that undermines our belief in morality, it would undermine our belief in the external world, other minds, the uniformity of nature, and the past as well. It raises the question of whether a mind or a brain that is the product of evolution can be a reliable belief-producing machine. If not, then I suppose we might as well give up on epistemology altogether and become radical skeptics. But if so, then we should trust the deliverances of reason.
ChatGPT
Here’s a follow-up I’m curious about:
Even if we accept that moral intuitions are generally reliable, how do you go from “there are objective moral truths” to “God exists and imposes moral obligations”?
I want to understand the step from recognizing morality as objective to the conclusion that a personal God underwrites it. How do you make that connection?
Sam
Morality makes demands on our behavior. If there were no sentient beings in the universe as well as no gods, angels, or persons of any kind, then any description of a world like that would be composed solely of "is" statements. There couldn't possibly be any true "ought" statements. If there is any particular way things are supposed to be, then there must be somebody who intends them to be that way. Nothing matters unless there's somebody it matters to. So there can't be any way we ought to behave until somebody imposes that obligation on us.
ChatGPT
I’m curious about the next step:
How do you move from the idea that some being imposes moral obligations to the specific claim that this being is Yahweh, the God of the Bible, rather than some other possible kind of moral lawgiver?
I ask because I know you mentioned earlier that you’re about 85% sure it’s Yahweh. What methods or evidence lead you from “there is a moral lawgiver” to “it is Yahweh specifically”?
Sam
I was going to explain that, but I accidentally hit the enter key before I did.
Since we have moved on from talking about how we justify belief in objective morality and have changed the topic to how objective morality points to God, I take it that we are at least assuming, for the sake of argument, that we have established the existence of objective morals. So let's work with that assumption. They are real.
We have all sort of hierarchies in our civilizations. We have parents, supervisors, commanders, and governing authorities. While we have obligations to obey them, those obligations are not absolute. In fact, we often invoke morality to judge whether an authority is just. If we want to change the law, for example, we appeal to some moral principle for why it should change. That means no human institution is adequate to ground morality. Morality is what we use to judge human institutions.
So the origin of morality must lie outside of humanity. We can't ground it in aliens because they are creatures just like us. If they have different values, then the best we can come up with is cultural relativism, which is not the same thing as moral realism.
Whatever grounds morality must be a transcendent being that has authority over the sorts of beings that evolved to live in the universe. The more you think about it, the more it starts to resemble a god.
The reason I think it actually IS a god, and that it's specifically the Abrahamic God is because of how it coheres with other arguments. The moral argument, by itself, doesn't explain how or why god came to have moral authority over the cosmos. But the Kalam argument and the contingency argument can explain that. If these two arguments are sound, it would mean there is a necessary being who created the universe. A being like that would be ultimate in some sense. It would have no peers. It would be absolutely sovereign and autonomous. Everything would owe its existence to this being. It's hard to imagine a better candidate for absolute moral authority.
ChatGPT
If so, I’m curious about a step that sometimes challenges people:
How do you weigh the possibility that there could be a different kind of necessary, ultimate being—one that exists and grounds morality—but isn’t exactly the God described in the Bible?
What makes Yahweh the best candidate rather than some other conceivable ultimate being?
Sam
That's a great question. Nothing I've argued so far rules out that possibility. However, there are certain things that emerge from these various arguments that begin to resemble the Abrahamic God that does not resemble any other known God. Judaism was one of the few monotheistic religions for a time. Most creation myths do not involve a necessary being who brings about all of physical reality. Usually, it's a lesser sort of being that organizes pre-existing material. If the Kalam is a sound argument, then the creator brought the universe into being out of nothing. Not many Gods are like that. If the moral argument is sound, then not only is god an absolute moral authority, but he's also the absolute standard of goodness, which means he himself is the paradigm of moral perfection.
Even with all that, we still can't rule out the possibility that the true God is some other God besides Yahweh. There are a couple of reasons it seems to point to Yahweh, though.
First, because the Jews wrote about Yahweh long before philosophers ever cooked up these arguments. If these arguments are sound, then it's either an enormous coincidence that the Jews came up with a God like Yahweh, or else Yahweh actually revealed himself to them. It seems more likely that Yahweh revealed himself to the Jewish people than that they just made a lucky guess about the true God.
Second, if there is a God with absolutely moral authority who cares how we live our lives, how we treat other people, etc., it stands to reason that this God would want to reveal himself to humanity. With that in mind, it seems unlikely that it would be a totally unknown God. This gives us prima facie reason to be skeptical that the true God is a God who nobody knows about.
So far, I've just argued for why philosophy points to a God who resembles the Abrahamic God in striking ways. But what really seals the deal for me is the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus promoted the Abrahamic God, claimed to be sent by him, then was raised from the dead. The resurrection of Jesus seems to seal the deal about who the real God is.
ChatGPT
How do you assess the reliability of the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus?
What’s your method for concluding that the resurrection actually happened, rather than it being a legend, misinterpretation, or symbolic story?
Sam
That's a big discussions, so I'm going to stop here. Thank you for playing this game with me.
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