Michael Martin (1932-2015) Was a Professor at Boston University and Author

question 4

True/False

Michael Martin (1932-2015) was a professor at Boston University and author of several books including Atheism, Morality, and Meaning (2002) and Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (1990). He also edited several collections, most notably The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (2006). Martin critiques Alvin Plantinga's argument that it is acceptable for persons to believe that God exists even if they cannot produce evidence or argument to justify that belief. Plantinga begins with the traditional philosophical view that all our beliefs are based ultimately on beliefs that are "properly basic"-they are either self-evident (such as "two plus two equals four") or evident to the senses (as when our looking at or remembering a tree shows immediately that there is or was a tree). To be counted as genuine knowledge our beliefs must be either properly basic or justified by beliefs that ultimately rest on those that are properly basic. Plantinga contends that belief in God can be a properly basic belief and thus require no supporting evidence. Martin argues, however, that because Plantinga's approach allows people to formulate their own properly basic criteria from their own unique experience and perspective, almost any belief-no matter how bizarre-could be considered properly basic.
-Martin asserts that belief in God seems inappropriate for inclusion in the class of basic belief.

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Definitions:

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Variance

A measure of the dispersion or spread of a set of values, quantified as the average of the squared deviations from the mean.

Critical Value

A point on the scale of the test statistic beyond which we reject the null hypothesis; it defines the cutoff between significant and non-significant results.

Significance Level

Another term for level of significance, it represents the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis when it is actually true, typically denoted by alpha (α).