KNOWLEDGE AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF

Think ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (58) ◽  
pp. 39-53
Author(s):  
Maria Rosa Antognazza
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Epistemology ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Reformed Epistemology

ABSTRACTIntroductions to epistemology routinely define knowledge as a kind of belief which meets certain criteria. In the first two sections of this article, I discuss this account and its application to religious epistemology by the influential movement known as Reformed Epistemology. In the last section, I argue that the controversial consequences drawn from this account by Reformed Epistemology offer one of the best illustrations of the untenability of a conception of knowledge as a kind of belief. I conclude by sketching an alternative account of cognition which also provides a different framework for religious epistemology.

Reformed Epistemology in a Jamesian Perspective

Horizons ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence W. Tilley
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Social Epistemology ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
William James ◽  
Epistemic Status ◽  
Alvin Plantinga ◽  
Religious Epistemology ◽  
William Alston ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Reformed Epistemology

AbstractThis essay argues that the reformed epistemologists (William Alston, Alvin Plantinga) have not (yet) sustained claims in religious epistemology significantly more extensive than William James did in the Varieties. It argues that even if reformed epistemologists show that religious belief can have a positive epistemic status, their approach may finally lead to relativism (given that religious traditions generate contradictory religious beliefs) because it offers no method for finding which, if any, concrete religious beliefs might be preferable to hold or in which religious practices one should engage, if any, and because it fails to distinguish between original and derived religious belief. I suggest that more attention must be paid to “social epistemology” if religious epistemology is to go significantly beyond James's accomplishments.

scholarly journals First Person and Third Person Reasons in Religious Epistemology

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Zagzebski
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
The Other ◽  
First Person ◽  
Epistemic Reasons ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Religious Epistemology ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Religious Disagreement

In this paper I argue that there are two kinds of epistemic reasons. One kind is irreducibly first personal – what I call deliberative reasons. The other kind is third personal – what I call theoretical reasons. I argue that attending to this distinction illuminates a host of problems in epistemology in general and in religious epistemology in particular. These problems include (a) the way religious experience operates as a reason for religious belief, (b) how we ought to understand religious testimony, (c) how religious authority can be justified, (d) the problem of religious disagreement, and (e) the reasonableness of religious conversion.

Religious Pluralism as a Problem for ‘Practical’ Religious Epistemology

1994 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-169
Author(s):  
Terrence W. Tilley
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Religious Epistemology ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
Naturalistic Approach ◽  
Rational Acceptance ◽  
Complete Account

After being dismissed for decades in philosophical theology, experiential arguments for the justification of religious belief, including belief in God, have again come to centre stage. One of the most thorough of these is William Alston's recent study, Perceiving God. Alston's purpose is to show that it is rational for someone to participate in what he calls Christian Mystical Practice (CMP) because CMP ‘is a socially established doxastic practice that is not demonstrably unreliable or otherwise disqualified for rational acceptance’ and to hold beliefs which that participation reliably generates. The thesis of this essay is that his individuation of mystical practices is not sufficiently nuanced. Once his naturalistic approach is brought more closely into line with actual practices, what he calls CMP splinters into multiple practices. A more complete account requires a more pluralistic understanding of the Christian traditions than Alston acknowledges.

The epistemological limits of experience-based exclusive religious belief

2008 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 445-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
ERIK BALDWIN ◽  
MICHAEL THUNE
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
General View ◽  
Alvin Plantinga ◽  
Salient Features ◽  
Reformed Epistemology ◽  
Epistemic Criteria

AbstractAlvin Plantinga and other philosophers have argued that exclusive religious belief can be rationally held in response to certain experiences – independently of inference to other beliefs, evidence, arguments, and the like – and thus can be ‘properly basic’. We think that this is possible only until the believer acquires the defeater we develop in this paper, a defeater which arises from an awareness of certain salient features of religious pluralism. We argue that, as a consequence of this defeater, continued epistemic support for exclusive religious belief will require the satisfaction of non-basic epistemic criteria (such as evidence and/or argumentation). But then such belief will no longer be properly basic. If successful, we will have presented a challenge not only to Plantinga's position, but also to the general view (often referred to as ‘reformed epistemology’) according to which exclusive religious belief can be properly basic.

scholarly journals A proper de jure objection to the epistemic rationality of religious belief

2010 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
TODD R. LONG
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Epistemic Justification ◽  
Epistemic Rationality ◽  
Reformed Epistemology

AbstractI answer Alvin Plantinga's challenge to provide a ‘proper’ de jure objection to religious belief. What I call the ‘sophisticates’ evidential objection' (SEO) concludes that sophisticated Christians lack epistemic justification for believing central Christian propositions. The SEO utilizes a theory of epistemic justification in the spirit of the evidentialism of Richard Feldman and Earl Conee. I defend philosophical interest in the SEO (and its underlying evidentialism) against objections from Reformed epistemology, by addressing Plantinga's criteria for a proper de jure objection, his anti-evidentialist arguments, and the relevance of ‘impulsional evidence’. I argue that no result from Plantinga-style Reformed epistemology precludes the reasons I offer in favour of giving the SEO its due philosophical attention.

scholarly journals Zagzebski, Authority, and Faith

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 47-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trent Dougherty
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Epistemic Authority ◽  
Religious Epistemology ◽  
The Face ◽  
Mature Work ◽  
High Octane

Epistemic Authority is a mature work of a leading epistemologist and philosopher of religion (and metaphysician, too, but that character doesn’t feature in this story). It is a work primarily in epistemology with applications to religious epistemology. There are obvious applications of the notion of epistemic authority to philosophy of religion. For, on the face of it, the notion of some kind of ‘epistemic authority’ may serve as a conceptual anchor for our understanding of faith. Indeed, there is ample historical precedent for this. Faith, says Locke, is ‘the assent to any proposition ... upon the credit of the proposer, as coming from God, in some extraordinary way of communication’. 1 In later Lockeans, ‘credit’ is often rendered ‘authority’, and the terms were used synonymously at the time of his writing. 2 One of the beauties of Locke’s view is its reductionism, that is, it’s parsimony, which is a species of elegance and therefore beauty. Zagzebski’s notion is more high-octane than Locke’s. In this essay I will do four things. In Section 1 I will describe two kinds or notions of authority or at least two usages of the word ‘authority’. In Section 2 I will describe Zagzebski’s use of one of these notions, the non-Lockean one, to ground the reasonableness of religious belief. In Section 3 I will give four arguments against her view. In section 4 I will reply to her critique of Locke. The upshot, in my view, is that though we learn much (very much indeed) from Epistemic Authority (about both testimony in general and religious testimony in particular among many other things), a more Lockean approach to the nature of faith is still preferable.

scholarly journals Divine Methodology: A Lawful Deflection of Kantian and Kantian-esque Defeaters

Open Theology ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyler Dalton McNabb ◽  
Erik Daniel Baldwin
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Religious Epistemology ◽  
The Family ◽  
Cognitive Faculties

AbstractImmanuel Kant argues that though Divine revelation is ontologically possible, given phenomenal level constraints on our cognitive faculties, it isn’t epistemically possible for us to know or to recognize Divine revelation on the noumenal level of reality. We call this Kant’s Epistemological Objection Against Divine Revelation (EOADR). Contra Kant, in this paper, we argue that the EOADR doesn’t undermine the Reformed tradition’s view of Divine revelation because it has resources that make knowledge of Divine revelation intelligible. The primary way of establishing our argument is by articulating and furthering Alvin Plantinga’s religious epistemology. After doing this, we tackle two objections to our approach that are in the family of Kant‘s objection, namely Stephen Law‘s X-Argument Against Religious Belief and Erik Baldwin‘s Multiple Viable Extensions Objection. Similar to Kant‘s argument, these arguments attempt to show, that the Reformed epistemologist is in danger of acquiring an undercutting defeater for trusting her religious belief. We respond to each in turn.

Quasi-Fideism and Religious Conviction

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 51-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Pritchard
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Religious Commitment ◽  
Rational Belief ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Religious Conviction ◽  
Religious Convictions ◽  
Important Sense ◽  
Reformed Epistemology ◽  
Epistemic Standing

It is argued that standard accounts of the epistemology of religious commitmentfail to be properly sensitive to certain important features of the nature of religious conviction. Once one takes these features of religious conviction seriously, then it becomes clear that we are not to conceive of the epistemology of religious conviction along completely rational lines.But the moral to extract from this is not fideism, or even a more moderate proposal (such as reformed epistemology) that casts the epistemic standing of basic religious beliefs along nonrational lines. Rather, one needs to recognise that in an important sense religious convictions are not beliefs at all, but that this is compatible with the idea that many other religious commitments are beliefs. This picture of the nature of religious commitment is shown to fit snugly with the Wittgensteinian account of hinge commitments, such that all rational belief essentially presupposes certain basic arational hinge commitments, along lines originally suggested by John Henry Newman. We are thus able to marshal a parity-style argument in defence of religious commitment. Although religious belief presupposes basic arational religious convictions, it is not on this score epistemically amiss since all belief presupposes basic arational convictions, or hinge commitments. The resulting view of the epistemology of religious commitment is a position I call quasi-fideism.

scholarly journals Reidianism in Contemporary English-Speaking Religious Epistemology

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-284
Author(s):  
Peter Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Religious Epistemology ◽  
Specific Topic ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
English Speaking

This paper explores the main contours of recent work in English-speaking philosophy of religion on the justi cation of religious belief. It sets out the main characteristics of the religious epistemologies of such writers as Alston, Plantinga, and Swinburne. It poses and seeks to answer the question of how far any or all of these epistemologies are indebted or similar to the epistemology of the Scottish enlightenment thinker Thomas Reid. It concludes that while there are some links to Reid in recent writing, contemporary approaches depart from Reid’s views on the specific topic of the justification of religious belief. 

Religious Knowledge versus Religious Understanding

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Scott
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Epistemology ◽  
Skeptical Argument ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Religious Context ◽  
Interesting Topic ◽  
Religious Understanding

In religious epistemology there is a significant amount of focus on religious knowledge, but much less attention has been paid to religious understanding. This is unfortunate. It is unfortunate not just because religious understanding is an interesting topic but also because religious understanding is more epistemically valuable than religious knowledge. This chapter presents two reasons for thinking this is the case. The first is that the connection between understanding and action gives us reason to think this, and the second is that understanding plays a more important role in a religious context. Following this, the chapter argues that we ought to reconsider skeptical arguments against religious belief because although they may undermine knowledge, they may not undermine understanding—the chapter offers an example of a skeptical argument where focusing on understanding rather than knowledge provides us with a straightforward response.

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