Forthcoming as Chapter Three of Problems of Religious Luck: Assessing the Limits of Reasonable Religious Disagreement. Lexington Books, 2019. Guy Axtell, all rights reserved: author contact gsaxtell@radford.edu. This is libre copy. Please quote/cite published copy: ISBN 987-1-4985-5018-5 (e-text). https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498550185/Problems-of-Religious-LuckAssessing-the-Limits-of-Reasonable-Religious-Disagreement PART II Applications and Implications of Inductive Risk "Our eyes see nothing backward. A hundred times a day we mock our neighbors, and detest in others certain defects which are much more apparent in us; yea, and marvel at them with heedlessness and audacity.... Oh, importunate presumption!" – Michel de Montaigne1 Chapter Three Enemy in the Mirror: The Need for Comparative Fundamentalism In Part II of this book our focus largely shifts from the unwieldy but diagnostically useful concept of religious luck to that of moral and intellectual risk. Of course, risky doxastic strategies, or what in the literature are often called belief-forming functions, may be a rather special concern; they do not illuminate all aspects of religious orientation. But people's penchant for inductively risky inference inside the religious domain indicate for psychologists and 2 religious studies scholars a useful means of measuring the degree of fideistic commitment characteristic of a particular religious grouping. This can be determined along a scale from minimally to strongly fideistic. Risk-based measures allows for a more direct focus on the degree of fideistic orientation. They also enable psychologists to study the ways in which strong fideism with an agent making judgments that 'mirror' known personal and social biases. The questions I will suggest to expand fundamentalist orientation scales and give them broader comparative grip are questions about the connections between strong fideism and risk tolerance. From our theoretical background in Part I, we might reasonably hope to formulate not only new research questions, but also new scales and measures that help cognitive and social psychologists measure the degree of fideistic orientation displayed by religious subjects, or inherent in the particular conceptions of faith (theological methods) they adhere to. So one central thesis of Part II is that the concept of inductive risk I propose helpfully operationalizes radically asymmetric trait-ascriptions. My thesis is that the inductive riskiness of religious doxastic methods that individuals use, or that are prescribed by different models of faith, helpfully operationalizes the broader social scientific, philosophical, moral, and theological interest that people may have with problems of religious luck. Accordingly, we will speak less about luck in Part II, and more about specific markers of high inductive risk and their complex relationship to the study of human biases. In this chapter and Chapter 4, my special focus is on the need for comparative fundamentalism (hereafter CF), and on how a better inductive risk 'toolkit' can empower its development.2 I explain why an empirically-informed study of inductively risky patterns of inference on the part of agents allows for a significant expansion of the scales used by psychologists to study religious orientation, and most especially fundamentalist orientation. We 3 will take time to carefully describe the thesis of psychological fideism, the distinction between psychological and religious fideism, and the different ways that this distinction is important for social scientists, philosophers, and theologians.3 Psychological (descriptive) fideism is an explanatory thesis, and one that can be tested and continually revised. Chapter 6 develops certain aspects of it by asking about connections between our own focus on counter-inductive thinking, and research in CSR focused on the appeal of minimally counter-intuitive religious ideas. If our application of the inductive risk account in Part II help to connect the study of fundamentalist orientation and with more general work in CSR, then one result should be that philosophers, psychologists and theologians should all find overlapping interests in the violation of inductive norms, just as I hope, after Part I that they all find interest some connections to their own field in problems of religious luck. Understanding and predicting religious radicalization is important to whatever resources we have for responding to it. Whitehouse and McQuinn (2013) bring additional theory to help analyze religious radicalization in the form of DMR theory, or divergent modes of religiosity. It highlights that the more severe or risky are the requirements for entry into a group identity, the greater the greater the liking or emotional connection with group members.4 But beyond prediction and control, what about risk and doxastic responsibility with respect to such attitudes? How will we develop our inductive risk account of the limits of reasonable religious disagreement? That is a normative and philosophical question. Developing this normative or philosophical side of the inductive risk account is the second central thesis of Part II. In developing this side of the inductive risk account concerned with guidance, we must endeavour to keep psychology and censure/critique of strong fideism and of fundamentalist orientation, properly separated. Psychological fideism deserves to be studied, but morally risky 4 belief that exhibits markers of bias mirroring, I argue, deserves censure. So morally risky belief (and however explained theologically) deserves censure. This is to say that my de jure argument against theological defences of the reasonableness of an exclusivist response to religious contrariety, as it will be developed further in Part II and especially in the arguments of Chapter 5, is a philosophical thesis. It is based on moral, logical, and epistemological concerns, even though it draws heavily upon psychological studies. Remembering this we can boost the strength of our de jure argument by making it more "proper." Chapter 6, while it focuses on CSR and is mostly concerned with the first side of the project, also clarifies my critique of religious exclusivism and attendant apologetic strategies by examining more directly the relationship between de jure and de facto objections. The result of development and application of the inductive risk account's normative side should ideally be this. The reader agrees with me that reasonability and doxastic responsibility are closely tied, and that while there are many permissive of faith ventures, The exclusivist response to religious multiplicity does not deserve to be given a free pass as reasonable, nor is what Griffith's describes as "polemical apologetics" among exclusivist religions or sects reasonable disagreement.5 From Philosophy of Luck to an Inductive Risk Toolkit Enlightenment philosophes who contributed to the rebirth of toleration were generally concerned not with all forms of religiosity, but with what they called "religious enthusiasm," which they took to be manifested cross-denominationally. This is as much to say that comparative philosophy must strive to understand fundamentalism's varied forms through more careful attention both to particulars about distinct sects, and to formally common features within 5 and between whole families of religion. Fundamentalist orientation is not only –I daresay not nearly– so much a matter of what is believed, as about how religious beliefs and moral rules are taken up and maintained; these recurring patterns are best studied comparatively.6 There have been a number of fundamentalism scales put to use in psychology, and our project of explaining the value of measures connected with moral and epistemic risk will try to build off of these. Until recently few such scales aimed to be comparative enough to work even with populations across the Abrahamic religions. Fortunately, there are now scales aimed at illuminating the "multi-dimensionality" of fundamentalist religiosity, scales which provide better comparison across religious affiliations.7 Jose Liht, Sarah Savage and their research team, for example, approach comparison within Abrahamic religions by identifying seven areas symptomatic of the tension between traditional religiosity and modernity. Like Altemeyer and Hunsberger (2004), Liht, Savage and their colleagues take a sensible approach to establishing scales that support cross-cultural or comparative study of fundamentalism. Consulting with experts from the three Abrahamic faiths in order to ensure the face and construct validity of the scale, these researchers went on to design multiple items (questions, half pro-trait, half anti-trait) for each of these seven areas: 1. Protection of revealed traditions versus rational criticism 2. Heteronomy versus autonomy and relativism 3. Traditionalism versus progressive religious change 4. Sacralization versus secularization of the public arena 5. Secular culture perceived as a threat versus secular culture embraced 6. Pluralism versus religious centrism 6 7. Millennial-Messianic imminence versus prophetic skepticism. What the authors term their Multi-Dimensional Fundamentalism Inventory (MDFI) addresses attitudes and group dynamics, and not just beliefs. But while it appears to be a substantial improvement over older scales, from the approach we are taking, few of the items engage very directly with characteristic patterns of inference and their inherent riskiness. Only #1 and #6 begin to get at how people reason when they ascribe traits and explain differences between religious insiders and outsiders. If psychologists take my suggestion to be well-motivated and feasible, then one important result would be to establish more direct connections between current research programmes in psychology of religion and philosophy. We will return to these concerns about how philosophy or luck/risk might enable more accurate and useful scales of fideistic orientation later in this chapter and the next. But as a more general methodological point, there are likely to be different understandings of problems of religious luck, and different views on their philosophical and theological implications. My expressed purpose is to improve our ability to understand and respond to fundamentalist religiosity, but this may well differ from the use that others want to make of problems of religious luck, either philosophically or theologically. The safety-based concerns for faith-based belief can cut a number of ways: against knowledge, truth, rationality, or moral responsibility. Our normative concern in this book is primarily with the limits of reasonable disagreement, and so with this narrowed purpose in mind we should avoid getting sidetracked onto other issues about epistemic status that might lead us astray.8 I do not want to say a lot about its implications beyond its contributions to CF, since as noted earlier I have no strong thesis to promote in respect to the debate between theists, atheists, and principled agnostics over the truth of theism. 7 Similarly we don't want to go astray by confusing our de jure challenge targeting salvific exclusivism with a different kind of challenge, a de facto challenge. Salvific exclusivism is one of the attitudes characteristic of fundamentalists of different faith traditions. Faultless disagreement does not occur under conditions of self-deception, and so the inductive risk account says that we should not take it as occurring under conditions of counter-inductive thinking. Ways of acquiring or maintaining a belief dependent upon apparent violations of inductive norms are far from faultless, and the beliefs of agents who rely on such methods are especially exposed to serious etiological challenge. Returning to our main topic, the first question that this chapter should propose in connection with CF is, "Can counter-inductive thinkers come to recognize their mirror images?" The "enemy in the mirror" is a metaphor which researchers of comparative fundamentalism and religious radicalization have sometimes used to describe a concern of special interest.9 On the view to be developed, the enemy in the mirror is a direct consequent of counter-inductive thinking when applied to a multiplicity of narrative testimonial traditions. This Enemy in the Mirror Phenomenon (EMP) will be a technical term for our study, as this will aid our attempt to explain in the next section how religious contrariety arises on the basis of etiological symmetries. The final section brings the discussion back around to our de jure challenge to religious exclusivist response to religious multiplicity. There I distinguish two forms of exclusivism that we find defended in the literature, particularist exclusivism and mutualist exclusivism, and I present a dilemma that aims to expose the serious inconsistencies of each. Those of fundamentalist orientation tend to identify certain fundamentals of the faith and elevate these to absolutes. Of course, I have not claimed that fideism is rendered extreme only by 8 engendering exclusivist attitudes about religious truth or salvation. It can also be rendered extreme in other ways, for example by placing faith into conflict with reason; by conflating subjective or psychological certitude with objective justification or warrant; by engaging in purely 'negative' apologetics, by distaining philosophy and science, or using them only in an ad hoc manner; by asserting that non-believers should live under the yoke of divine command, Sharia law, or an institutionalized religious authority –a theocratic state. Like "religion," "fundamentalism" is a family-relations concept, a concept with multiple aspects such that manifesting different combinations of these aspects may be sufficient to fall under the description. Religious fundamentalism identifies ways of reasoning that go beyond conservativism and orthodoxy. Religious fundamentalism has forms that arguably can be active in all religions. Yet the common characteristics of fundamentalism, including especially exclusivist attitudes about religious truth and salvation are features of some religions, and some models of faith, more so than others.10 The need for scales that measure a propensity among religious subjects for inductively risky doxastic strategies is our main concern, but of course in the broader context of CF, I am only arguing that the markers of inductive risk be recognized as one marker of religious extremism among others.11 Psychological (descriptive) fideism is a thesis about how affective elements impact how people understand faith and the particular commitments faith binds one to.12 It does not presuppose that people are always self-aware, as writers like James and Kierkegaard most clearly are, about the influence of emotion or affect and related extraevidential factors over what religious or theological statements they accept as true. Getting clear about the thesis of psychological fideism is important, because it can be the basis for predictions 9 of characteristic ways of thinking. I argue that inductive risk gives definition to the thesis of descriptive fideism as a working hypothesis in the science of religions. In "Faith and the Right to Believe," William James defines faith tendencies, for the purposes of an empiricist approach that might aid development of a science of religion, as "extremely active psychological forces, constantly outstripping evidence." Let's call this James' psychological fideism; it is his claim that the psychological dynamics of religious faith, as studied through its 'characters' and 'varieties,' integrally involve the will or the passional nature of human agents. This descriptive fideism is best illustrated in what James termed the 'faith-ladder' and its progressive rungs or steps: 1. There is nothing absurd in a certain view of the world being true, nothing selfcontradictory; 2. It might have been true under certain conditions; 3. It may be true, even now; 4. It is fit to be true; 5. It ought to be true; 6. It must be true; 7. It shall be true, at any rate true for me. Famous for a "subjective method" he shared with Kierkegaard's, James' ethics of belief is often criticized for its radical level of permission to believe that which fulfills certain needs for meaning and value in life, even when undermined by evidence. While I am a permissivist, I think that James presented a too one-sided an account of the "courage" and "caution" principles with regard to faith-based "doxastic ventures." But my main point here is that James is quite correct, 10 descriptively, that epistemic risk in religious assent, whatever doxastic attitudes we ascribe to it. The "faith ladder," as James terms it, crosses the philosopher's division between "Is" and "Ought" claims, and from an analytical perspective is "no logical chain of inferences." But the agent's perspective is often far from an analytical perspective, and psychological fideism needs to be carefully distinguished in a science of religion from religious fideism.13 One can't properly address the question of one's 'right' to believe (or the limits to that right), without accepting something like the faith-ladder's psychological descriptions of how the believer – especially the believer of fundamentalist orientation – typically reasons.14 Psychological fideism should therefore also be distinguished from any religious apologetic strategy or theological, and from any thesis bearing directly on the ethics of belief. One cannot properly address the question of one's 'right' to believe (or the limits to that right), without accepting something like the faith-ladder's psychological descriptions of how the believer typically reasons.15 A skeptic could accept it as well as a theist, though these two radically disagree about what a person should believe. It was quite evident to James that faith tendencies are value-charged schemes of thought; religious cognition not only reveals leaps from ought-to-be to is, and from might be true to is true, systematic theology often wears such leaps on its sleeve. So how ironic it must have seemed to James that that almost in inverse proportion to the strength of a person's fideistic orientation, they tend to try to 'sink the fact' of the evidential underdetermination of what James aptly termed their religious "overbeliefs." For how could James, a forger of the fields of empirical psychology and of East/West comparative philosophy of religion, not acknowledge how religious characters habitually "live upon the faithladder"? One reason for favoring the concept of inductive risk in our approach to religious epistemics is that, since this concept is a well-recognized concern in science policy decision11 making, any ability to carry it over to philosophy of religion opens up some methodological parallels between theological and scientific reasoning. Being a proponent of the Dialogue Model of the relationship between science and religion, this is something I would like to encourage. The risk of getting it wrong, we all recognize, is potentially a moral as well as epistemological risk. Risk-management is as much an issue for the limits of reasonable religious faith ventures as it is for decision-making over practical affairs. For our study it, the concept of "reasonableness" is not given to any pet theory of evidence; our use of the concept relate it to lack of blameworthiness, as responding to both epistemic and ethical norms. Any agent's doxastic method that is inductively risky from a non-religiously committed standpoint marks itself as a potential target for criticism, or what we will call censure. The more so as other persons are done an epistemic injustice by it, censure of the agent's doxastic responsibility may range over moral as well as epistemological concerns. Any of the markers of religious fundamentalism noted above can be considered from the perspective of risk that one person or group's faith venture may affect others in adverse ways. Arguably, that fundamentalist faith ventures risk others in ways that more moderate religious faith ventures do not, is as clearly observable as that, in game theory, defectors risk cooperators, while cooperators do not similarly risk defectors. In Tragedy of the Commons, for example, the cooperators do not really risk others, because their choices aim for the best available outcome for everyone. But a defector by contrast makes choices that, in order to maximize personal (or group) gain, severely risks destruction of the goods of broader trust and cooperation. The non-cooperators are often studied in game theory as following strategies that impede the social evolution of cooperation. Why isn't the logic of fundamentalist religiosity analogous to this sort of asymmetry exhibited by defectors?16 Why shouldn't the habits of 12 inference descriptive of Barthian fideism be studied in light of game theory, where the concept of a "magic circle" - a shielded but never fully self-enclosed space where normal rules and expectations as suspended -is central to a good deal of theory?17 This suggests that responsible faith ventures are maintained only with awareness of and appropriate responsiveness to inductive risk. On the present account, the limits of responsible faith ventures are not set by any one type of adequacy that the religious agent recognizes, epistemic, moral, or theological, but by the agent's recognition of each of these functioning through checks-and-balances on the other two.18 Permissible or virtuous faith ventures will thus be assured to be balanced between the courage of religious virtue and religious particularity, and the caution of independent or universal moral and intellectual virtue; they will be balanced between responsiveness not only to risk to one's own person, but to risks that my faith venture might pose to others, physically, socially, or psychologically. Risk and responsibility are closely connected: The riskiness of one's method of forming one's religious beliefs is central not just to explanatory concerns in the psychology of religion, but also to normative concerns with the ethics of belief. For many kinds of harm, the exposure of others to it already constitutes the main de jure issue. An exposure to harm is already a harm in the placing on others an unconsenting risk. Permissivist accounts in the ethics of belief need to set the limits of reasonability: they need to have 'teeth' in the sense that moderate fideism and recognition of a fideistic minimum in all of our faith ventures, is the best corrective to immoderate or radical fideism. When they fail to do so, it is not a form of permissivism as I understand it. It is an apologetic strategy that 'rides shotgun' for religious absolutism by defending for the laity an unqualified steadfast response to peer disagreement: theological nonaccommodationism. 13 There are positions in the epistemology of disagreement that are self-described as dogmatist, and the proponents of this position are also proponents of religious particularism.19 Dogmatism as a thesis is perhaps better described as mutualist impermissivism, than as permissivism. But we will examine it more closely in Chapter 4.20 People are not necessarily intellectually vicious for accepting nurtured beliefs and holding them without a great deal of reflection. But neither does such a permissivist account rationalize dogmatism or imply the reasonability, tout court, of holding to what we are taught. Permissionism should sharpen reasoned criticism rather than lead to its abandonment, and an inductive risk-focused account, as we will argue throughout this book, does much to show us how.21 Responsible agency implies that we have moral reasons to monitor, modify and moderate how we think about disagreement with epistemic peers. In the broad domain of controversial views, bias-ascriptions may fly in both directions between proponents of competing systems of belief. Now ascribing error to another's view can be a mark of respecting shared norms of rational criticism. Even doing so by attributing a bias to someone with whom one disagrees might be made honestly, in the hope that pointing out a bias will stimulate reflection on the part of that agent, and greater future habituation to critical reasoning dispositions. And not all ascription of error, or even of bias, is grounds for further ascription of culpability or blame. But the kind of metaphysical truth-declaration and peer denial we find on display in exchanges between aggressive atheists and religious fundamentalists draws courage from the persuasive appeal to informal fallacies such as genetic fallacy, psychologizing the other, appeal to ignorance, ad hominem, bandwagon, strawman, appeal to fear, etc.22 Employment of informal fallacies is certainly not praiseworthy, but the great difficulty humans have, cognitively and motivationally, with recognizing their own biases and trying to redressing them make doxastic 14 responsibility an especially difficult yet vital topic. I agree with Paul Thagard call for to avoid a long-standing conflation between "thinking" and argumentative "reasoning." Taking a more empirically-informed approach, "[W]hen arguments fail to convince, we should rarely look for the explanation in terms of the traditional fallacies, but rather in terms of the multitude of error tendencies that psychological research has shown to operate in human thinking."23 This is why a more general or domain-neutral review of personal and social biases is methodologically important to us. Evidence of bias supplies etiological information that may present a strong de jure challenge to a particular agent. Paradoxically perhaps, vice-charging can either be aimed at encouraging needed doxastic responsibility in the person so charged, or at insulating the vice-charger from criticisms of a similar sort directed at him by others. Peer denial in its most common form, as a dogmatic way to claim higher authority for one's beliefs or values while insulating them from criticism, is something we see throughout the broader domain of controversial views. Those loudest voices in our culture wars over science and religion attribute bias to each other. Often they are both right, but it is 'bunk de-bunking' whenever the attribution of a bias functions like (or simply as) a circumstantial ad hominem argument. Ian Kidd suggests that to begin to approach the question of sound versus simply self-protective instances of vice-charging, we should distinguish two types. Rhetorical complaints contrast with robust charges, where only the latter qualify as legitimate modes of criticism: A rhetorical vice charge involves an agent expressing a negative attitude, opinion, or evaluation of some other agent, whether expression is oral, literary, or bodily – a curt tweet, audible grown, eye-rolling, and so on. But, crucially, that 15 agent could not elaborate or 'unpack' the charge if asked to, for instance by explaining the reasoning that supports the negative judgment. Rhetorical charges involve reportage of one's negative judgments, but not the presentation of any reasons, evidence, or feelings in support of them, so they do not do any real critical work....24 Kidd's condition on a rhetorical vice charge would need to be strengthened to apply to the manner in which religious apologists could and sometimes do engage in rhetorical vicecharging. We will see examples of this later. But Kidd goes on to develop conditions of robust vice-charging. These require first a clear concept of epistemic responsibility, and so "should be sensitive to the etiology of vice and the ecological conditions of epistemic socialisation."25 If evidence of irrelevant influence is sometimes evidence of error, rationality demands that the vice attributor not ignore it as a defeater to personal justification. Where contingency anxiety and attendant epistemic humility is appropriate yet lacking in the agent, we can hypothesize that unconscious motivations will be triggered to engage in confabulatory explanation.26 For virtue theorists like Kidd, Vainio (2017, discussed below) and myself, de-biasing means encouraging the shared resources of the moral virtues of open-mindedness and reciprocity, and of intellectual virtues of epistemic humility and intellectual fair-mindedness.27 We can disagree about what balance of reason and faith to recommend, and whether to weigh risk of error higher or lower than desire for truth. But without valuing and habituating ourselves to inductive norms, what a person advances as generalizations, analogies, and explanations that help us understand religious difference arguably has the character of a story, a mythos, not logos. 16 Fundamentalist Orientation and the Risks of Teleological Suspension Religious fundamentalism is a term for tendencies that can be studied comparatively. So is religious fideism. Both concepts must be understood descriptively as befits academic religious studies, without the pejorative connotation put on them in popular writing and the culture wars more generally.28 Connotations that condemn whatever is called fundamentalist religiosity do not encourage dialogue, and strawman characterizations always serve to enable equally over-simple 'that's not us' reposts. While religious radicalization and violence are a focus of keen concern by academics, these are not synonymous with fundamentalism, which some see as just a way of being religious no more harmful than any other.29 This however might be to over-generalize in the opposite direction. At the height of theological hostility is often found an apocalyptic narrative of cosmic war, a narrative which invokes a moral dualism splitting earthly and supernatural beings into two basic camps of the good and the evil. Apocalypse and religious utopia/dystopia (since what is utopia for insiders is typically dystopia for outsiders) are among the most extreme uses of religious imagination, and often play a role in religious radicalization. Personal psychologists have looked at "the genesis of the need to divide the world into rigidly polarized, warring camps ... at the heart of religious fanaticism."30 As Mark Juergensmeyer, a sociologist noted for his work on religion and violence puts it, "the religious imagination... has always had the propensity to absolutize and to project images of cosmic war. It has also much to do with the social tensions of this moment of history that cry out for absolute solutions, and the sense of personal humiliation experienced by men who long to restore an integrity they perceive as lost...."31 17 So my approach agrees with Malise Ruthven that "Whether or not we like the term, fundamentalist or fundamentalist-like movements appear to be erupting in many parts of the world [and] the phenomena it encompasses deserve to be analysed." (6) Patterns of religious authority and leadership that characterize fundamentalism are, like "religion" itself, a matter of family relations. The concept of fundamentalism I deem to be quite legitimate, but are not wellcaptured by a set a necessary conditions, since different combinations of features may be sufficient for describing one's orientation as fundamentalist. What is clear is that fundamentalism has many forms, and that in some subset of those forms it gives rise to epistemic injustice, political and psychological harm, but only in extreme cases to a specific act of religious violence.32 There are numerous moral concerns that I believe make the comparative study of fundamentalism a pressing demand today. These moral concerns can briefly be broken down into three points. Firstly, fundamentalism threatens to cut off dialogue and the search for points of commonality, because it sees only the side of different, contradictory beliefs, not the side of common proximate causes and formal symmetries in the culturally nurtured manner of belief uptake. This neglect is indeed one of the clearest signs of unacknowledged similarity between fundamentalists of different sects. Trumping epistemological norms by 'truth-first' strategies can lead to an over-easy rejection of peerhood, and therefore also of the epistemic significance of religious disagreement. "Metaphysics is first philosophy" is the simple, pre-modern way of expressing a strong fideism, and of insulating a religious worldview from rational scrutiny even by religious insiders. For the average religious adherent who knows the narrative but is not a theologian, the effect may be that moral and epistemic concerns are discounted. What is taken as true 18 metaphysically is whatever is accepted through testimonial authority assumption, and the theological categories of the home religion. In On Religious Diversity, Robert McKim writes that "Members of religious traditions generally think that their tradition is superior to the competition. So they are committed to there being criteria of evaluation in virtue of which this is so."33 This does not mean that folk religiosity has the character of religious rationalism, or adheres to the evidentialist maxim that 'the wise proportion their belief to their evidence.' It rather means that an evidentialist apologetic strategy is often adopted, on which ample reason and evidence are said to be available to justify the home religion's theology, even though the actual basis of genuine faith is maintained not to be inference from evidence but as something more direct, and for the agent irresistible.34 But here of course the problems of circular reasoning and of the subjectivization of evidence sufficient to rationalize belief come to the fore. Chapter 2 briefly introduced (EGO), my version of an independencefrom-theory demand on reasons given in support of asymmetric attribution of religious truth or value to group insiders and outsiders. (EGO) says that ascribing differences to people needs to be supported with relevant difference reasoning, and it adds several constraints on this reasoning.35 Mainly it constrains us to appeal only to agent-level considerations to justify the ascription of an agent-level asymmetry: One ought to only appeal to epistemic considerations in justifying purported asymmetries of epistemic states and standings. Rationalists, whether religious rationalists who believe God's existence to be provable (a priori or a posteriori), or sceptical rationalists who set a high bar for rational belief and claim arguments for God's existence do not meet that bar, agree on one thing: These rationalists agree that the beliefs we hold should be reasons-responsive, 19 and supportable by neutral or independent reason. Traditionally, fideistic orientation is by degrees suspicious of rationalism, and with it of natural theology and religion-specific evidentialism. Reason is to only as allowed to support but not to challenge first assumptions: philosophy as the handmaid of theology who must always deliver a happy ending. The more threatening that reason and science are taken to be to one's faith, the more that the model of faith invites fundamentalist orientation, and with it a disregard of (EGO)'s norm of appealing to independent reasons to support one's beliefs. A second well-motivated concern motivating the comparative study of fundamentalism is that it is a common denominator in cases of religious violence where there is what Kierkegaard describes as an agent's "teleological suspension of the ethical." A problem with acts of unconditional assent to an authority is the possibility of fanaticism, and fanaticism sometimes drives either taking divine commands as the final arbiter of moral justification, or appropriating religious authority in the name of violent means to one's own ends. For those of us reliant on human modes of inquiry, such appeal to God to support, or even to motivate moral and epistemic divisions may be all that can be meant by 'getting it wrong.' The truths to which the believer assents are purportedly transcendent truths not open verification, or it seems to falsification. But this is a psychological fact: a decision on the part of the believer to accept certain tenets of faith as absolutes. Too often these contents, however, are identified as things culturally particular rather than culturally universal. As I ate lunch today, I read of a case where a recently radicalized Islamist yelling "God is great" stabbed a woman to death at a train stop in Marseilles, ran away, came back and stabbed a second woman who had gone to her aid, and when later soon thereafter confronted by police, charged at them as was shot. How is it that a just and great god authorizes or demands violence against countrymen and civilians? How is it that the surety of one's 20 metaphysical beliefs as a guide to action supersede not just basic moral intuitions, but as it appears at least in cases of religious hate crimes such as this, any genuinely universal moral principles? If we do not want to be politically naïve, we should not discount how complex and varied the causes of radicalization are, and the extent to which religion may not be a primary driver, but sometimes only a pawn, of conflict between ethnic groups or political ideologies.36 The politics of identity may involve numerous factors, and religious differences may be just one of these. But fundamentalism tends to breed ideologies that neglect private/public distinctions, and that are increasingly both religious and political in nature.37 The proximate causes of religious radicalization often involve highly selective interpretations and applications of a testimonial tradition's religious virtues and teachings. The idea that if you had enough faith you would do God's will without experiencing the moral dissonance between ones actions and universal moral principles like the Golden Rule, etc., is surely an idea of radical fideism: However counter-intuitive it is that a just God would demand the indifferent slaughter of innocents, if you had enough faith you would act on the (perceived) will of God and not demand independently good moral reasons.38 In this sense radical fideism is still closely associated with the "enthusiasm" or "fanaticism" that Enlightenment philosophes identified as driving back-andforth persecution between Catholics and Protestants. We see teleological suspension of the ethical in the biblical narrative in which Abraham responds to a perceived command to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, quite the opposite of what any loving parent would want. The particularism of divine commands and their potential conflict with universal morality is seen in this same Biblical narrative since God, in treating Isaac merely as a tool in a test of Abraham's faith, seems to act contrary not only to what one would think a just god would do, but also to the universal principle to treat others always as an end in 21 themselves and never merely as a means. Kierkegaard in his deep reflection on this Biblical passage in Fear and Trembling does not mention this latter point, but he does describe a teleological suspension as a subordination of the "universal" and the "particular." In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard writes, "The ethical as such is the universal, and as the universal it applies to everyone..." So in suspending the ethical, Abraham "acts by virtue of the absurd, for it is precisely absurd that he as the particular is higher than the universal.... By his act he overstepped the ethical entirely and possessed a higher telos outside of it, in relation to which he suspended the former."39 While teleological suspension of the ethical, in which the individual "becomes higher than the universal," has garnered a great deal of critical attention, what seems to have gone unnoticed in philosophy of religion is that this same fideistic suspension can attach to the logical and epistemological as well. Religious virtues can as easily come undone from universal logical and epistemological norms just as they can from universal ethical norms. Each such divergence of religious from independently-recognizable moral or intellectual virtue holds its own danger with respect to facilitating religious extremism. Emil Brunner, an early post-liberal theologian like Barth, claims that "God takes over all responsibility for our action."40 So later we will take time to elaborate this three-fold typology and identify psychological markers of these parallel concerns: teleological suspension of the ethics, the logical, and the epistemological. But briefly here, teleological suspension of the logical is an apt description of religious uniqueness maintained through counter-inductive thinking. Teleological suspension of the epistemological is an apt description of purely negative religious apologetics, and of at least some forms of an externalist or 'basic belief' apologetic. In many normal cases, the falsehood of a belief is consistent with its having been rationally held by an agent: Rationality is independent of truth, 22 but a good indication of what may responsibly be held to be true. But every instance where, if truth were to go missing, so would the agent's warrant and rationality in assenting that belief, can plausibly be seen as an instance of teleological suspension of the epistemological. For here external warrant and internal rationality were never allowed their natural independence. They are never indicators of truth; rather, the faith-based assumption of truth or divine authority is employed as a guarantor of the warrant and rationality enjoyed by the true believer. My third point about moral concerns that makes the comparative study of fundamentalism a pressing demand today is that fundamentalism threatens to make religious toleration an 'impossible virtue.' The difficulty with tolerance as Bernard Williams wrote, is that it seems to be a necessary and yet on certain assumptions an impossible virtue: It is necessary where different groups have conflicting beliefs - moral, political, or religious - and realize that there is no alternative to their living together, that is to say, no alternative except armed conflict, which will not resolve their disagreements and will impose continuous suffering. These are the circumstances in which toleration is necessary. Yet in those same circumstances it may well seem impossible.41 To be sure, there can be good moral and pragmatic reasons for tolerating others even when we feel sure that their beliefs are erroneous or their ways of life are immoral. This may even be so in a situation where you are part of a religious majority that could impose paternalistic laws. Also, "intolerance" is difficult to characterize, and it surely is not the case that fundamentalists are all personally intolerant. We need to be careful here of course since the characterization of certain groups as intolerant is sometimes a result of one-sidedness in one's 23 descriptions. But religious exclusivism and absolutism are two (among the multiple) marks of fundamentalist orientation, and those who argue that religious toleration is impossible are almost exclusively self-described exclusivists. There are clear logical connections between exclusivism and the "non-accommodation" of non-believers, at least soteriologically, in the doctrine of salvation if not also in the social sphere. We can leave it open just how 'accommodating' the reasonable accommodation of nonbelievers should be. Part of the problem with this recognition may be that on assumption of religious absolutism and the one true sect or religion, the very idea of theological if not also moral and political compromise can appear counter to God's plan. If you know the will of God, your duty is to see it enforced as you claim God intends it.42 But there is always an intellectual viciousness and an epistemic injustice done by the exclusivist in denying religious others as peers, and in not accommodating their virtue and reasonableness some reasonable way. But they do me wrong. They do me... a great wrong in this, that they make the same words which accuse my infirmity, represent me for an ungrateful person... [and] from a natural imperfection, make out a deficit of conscience. -Montaigne43 Conclusion In Part I we saw that how far a theology, theodicy, or apologetic response to unbelievers to or religious multiplicity 'leans of luck' is a largely descriptive and readily assessable matter once one understands what they are looking. It helps greatly to have a working taxonomy of the 24 different types of religious luck ascriptions people make, and examples of debatable problems associated with each type. We said that Part II would work to apply Part I's theory to religiosity in the wild by translating questions discussed among theologians and philosophers as problems of religious luck into more empirically approachable questions of degrees of epistemic risk, including especially the risk of getting it wrong in an inductive context of inquiry. So starting from what may most easily be tested for by psychologists, a test subject displaying dispositions toward counter-inductive thinking in the religious domain functions in my account as a key marker both of high doxastic risk toleration and of the strength of that individual's fideistic orientation. This together with other measures on a scale of strength of fideistic orientation becomes, in turn, a revealing new marker of fundamentalist orientation. So these proposals are aimed at giving the scholarly study of fundamentalism more tools and greater comparative validity. This chapter has accordingly argued that new scales related to ingroupoutgroup attitudes but focused on measuring propensities for inductively risky patterns of inference are what would provide interesting new and testable hypotheses in regard to fundamentalist orientation in particular. Scales for fideistic orientation and for fundamentalist orientation can be hypothesized to correlate to a high degree. A third possible scale, a scale for propensities to think counter-inductively, helps to tie these other two together; it potentially brings needed clarity to the scholarly study of religious fundamentalism and related areas such as the psychology of religious radicalization and religious violence. The inductive risk account holds that exhibiting comparatively risky doxastic methods indicates strongly fideistic orientation. But our discussion of bias studies in this chapter was quite general; we insisted only a) that personal and social biases affect many beliefs in domains 25 of controversial views, and b) that the domain of religious ideas is no exception to this general fact. But the 'mirroring' of known biases, as the next chapter will further elaborate, is important psychologically and philosophically. So the introduction to research on biases in this chapter is mainly background for the further development of our inductive risk account. Although these proposals may be quite sketchy and this point, we will continue to sharpen them in the next chapter, and especially in Chapter 6, which develops a number of more specific research questions, questions might also serve to more closely connect comparative fundamentalism (CF) and cognitive science of religions (CSR).44 Notes to Chapter Three 1 Montaigne, "Of the Art of Discussion," Montaigne's Essays, Book III. Renascence Editions. 2 "It's important to understand that opinions are often influenced by what we value. This mixing of beliefs and values sometimes makes it difficult or confusing to assess their truth. But a good critical thinker's toolkit provides the tools for tackling this seemingly tricky task" (Foresman, Fosl, and Watson, 2017). 3 As a methodological aside, despite our concern with narrative testimony we will not need to engage debates in the epistemology of disagreement, or even the epistemology of testimony very directly in this chapter, but will rather try to remain neutral. We do not, for instance, need to decide between the two normative theories, the 'concessionist' and the 'steadfast,' in the 26 epistemology (see Christiansen and Lackey eds. 2013). And while our central argument that the religious luck ascriptions that people make illuminate epistemological issues that are really concerns about inductive risk might be rendered stronger if testimonial transmission is inductive, nothing in our approach presupposes or necessitates that we take an inductive or reductionist position in the epistemology of testimony. Again we can perhaps serve the interest of connecting philosophy of luck to CF and CSR if we remain largely neutral on these 'in house' philosophical debates. 4 Supporting this theory of modes of ritual group formation, the authors cite studies showing that, "traumatic ritual ordeals increase cohesion and tolerance within groups, but they also seem to intensify feelings of hostility and intolerance towards outgroups" (Whitehouse and McQuinn 2013, 600). Introducing DMR theory they write, "the theory distinguishes a doctrinal mode characterized by routinized ritual, diffuse cohesion, hierarchical structure, and rapid dissemination to large populations from an imagistic mode characterized by rare and dramatic ritual ordeals and intense cohesion within small cults" (598). It has usually been used to explain the formation and spread of religious traditions, but the authors argue for its value in explaining association with armed groups, both religious and non-religious, engaged in civil conflicts. 5 By contrast, Leo D. Lefebure in Revelation, the Religions, and Violence argues that dialogue and nonviolence are tightly interdependent: "The struggle to overcome violence and form a healthy global community is one of the strongest reasons for interreligious dialogue. Indeed, the series of international movements of nonviolent resistance are among the most important fruits of interreligious exchange... To proclaim the revelation of God in Jesus Christ today calls for 27 Christians to critically appropriate our own tradition in dialogue with other religious voices" (2000, 23). 6 Robert C. Neville (2018, 147) holds the need to comparison even in a theological projects: "All serious theology should take place in and arise out of a solid grounding in the comparison of religious ideas. This is my hypothesis. Too many people believe that theology should be the reflection of religious ideas from the standpoint of a religious tradition by itself, exclusively in its own terms. For instance, many Christian theologians, influenced by Karl Barth, think that theology is a reading of the Christian word of God on its own terms without any serious mention of Jewish, Buddhist, Daoist, or Muslim theology. Sometimes this kind of theology is called "confessional" because it takes its rise from some theological starting point to which it confesses allegiance and then derives what follows from that. While confessional theology can be helpful for the fulsome expression of the implications of the theological starting point, it runs the grave danger of abandoning theology for intellectual sociology." 7 Liht et. al. (2011). 8 If we are to parallel Hume to a considerable extent, our focus should be on rational credibility-in our case not of testimony to miracles as interventions in the natural order, but of testimonial traditions and transmissions to radically asymmetrical attributions of religious value to insiders and outsiders of the home religion. 28 9 Roxanne Euben's (1999) Enemy in the Mirror focuses on Islamic fundamentalism but through an approach to political theory that is inherently comparative. She does not mean by this that movements presupposing nonrational, transcendent truths can be held to the bar of Enlightenment reason. Rather, Euben argues, conceptions of reason vary as do conceptions of faith, and a sound understanding of fundamentalism must test the scope of Western rationalist categories. For an advanced study of the dynamics of religious and ideological radicalization, see Alimi, Demetriou and Bosi, 2015. 10 Jakobus Vorster points out that "the three religions of the Book,' namely Christianity, Islam and Judaism have, in spite of deep-rooted differences in theology and ethics," have a remarkable similarity in being "prone" to fundamentalist orientation through a propositional or literalist view of the contents of their scriptures, or an infallibilist view of the vehicle of revelation. Psychological needs condition these particularist assumptions: "Scripturalism meets the need for certainty and authority for many people and gives them confidence in their pursuits. The appeal of these fundamentalisms is great because of the use of proof-texts that are easy to understand and to follow. Nationalism and patriotism combined with self-centric ideals create dangerous forces where violence for the sake of furthering a holy agenda becomes a romantic and even sacral strategy of change." Vorster, (2008), 49. 11 Un-safe belief raises concerns about the cognitive and moral risks of our various faith ventures. This is true to varying degrees with doxastic commitments we take on in all controversial fields. Allen Buchanan (2013) draws attention to "credibility prejudicing" as a major aspect of the moral and prudential risks of our social epistemic dependency. Where the 29 New Problem of religious luck is unique is partly in focusing on the most extreme and serious of risky belief in this particular field, which is why I initially described my purpose in articulating it as a contribution of comparative religious fundamentalism. 12 While most philosophy of religion textbook glossaries define fideism only in its religious and not also its psychological sense, David Shatz (2002, 559) laudably takes the more careful approach: "Fideism: (1) The view that religious belief is based on faith and not reason. (2) The view that religious belief should be based on faith and not reason" (italics original). The unequivocal "not" here likely skews Shatz's definition to fit only strong fideism, rather than the full range; yet I applaud his clear recognition of the need to make the psychological/religious distinction. 13 As J.C. Wernham correctly points out, "The ladder is not advocacy but description...If one compares James' will-to-believe doctrine and the ladder, one finds differences between them and similarities too. The will-to-believe doctrine is advocacy" (1987, 113). This may also indicate that as his thinking matured James became clearer about the need to distinguish the two senses of the term in order to avoid an overt Is-Ought fallacy. 14 For more on descriptive fideism see also Louis Pojman, (1986), chapter 9, and John Bishop (2007a and b). 15 For more on descriptive fideism see also Louis Pojman, (1986), chapter 9, and John Bishop (2007a and b). 30 16 Of course, this is only half the story because groups are typically cooperative internally even as they are competitive between groups. In evolutionary theory, social selection involves groups of cooperators out-competing other groups. According to Darwin in The Descent of Man (1871, Vol. I: 182, 179), "There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who [...] are always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over other tribes; and this would be natural selection." So the 'defector' analogy perhaps fits a relationship of competing groups, but within groups cooperation is high. Certainly religious groups are internally cooperative. But "primeval man," Darwin argues, "regarded actions as good or bad solely as they obviously affected the welfare of the tribe, not of the species" and corresponding vices, if practiced on other tries, typically "are not regarded as crimes." 17 The strong interest in the magic circle among some game theorists draws upon Durkheim's distinction between the sacred and profane. Especially as one understands Barthian fideism as an Independence model (more akin of Wittgenstein's language games) the strong reading of the circle metaphor as a circle enclosing and separating a faith community from the rest of the world, fits. Much fundamentalism is isolationist, with a narrative of being the city on a hill. This shared interests in entry of the circle and negotiation of its borders I suggest makes discussions of digital games relevant. See Stenros (2014) for a fine introduction. "The magic circle of play is the social contract that is created through implicit or explicit social negotiation and metacommunication in the act of playing. This social contract can become societal as other social frameworks (law, economics) can recognize it.... The participants are supposed to treat the encounter within the 31 borders of the social contract as disconnected from the external world and they are not supposed to bring external motivations...As a contractual barrier is established, the events within the border are loaded with special significance." 18 While I admire his many valid criticisms of Feldman's assumptions, the normative upshot for J. Adam Carter (2017), his controversial view agnosticism, is still a form of impermissivism. For exemplary work in support of a permissivist ethics of belief, see Haack (1997), Audi (2011), Kelly (2014), Kopec and Titelbaum (2016), and Booth and Peels (2014), Schoenfield (2014), and Simpson (2017). Permissivists hold that "the gap between the ways in which we are meant to normatively assess belief and action may not be as wide as has been thought." According to Booth and Peels, the Permissivist Thesis holds that "responsible belief is permissible rather than obliged belief. On the Unique Thesis (UT), our evidence is always such that there is a unique doxastic attitude that we are obliged to have given that evidence, whereas the Permissibility Thesis (PT) denies this." Although a fuller account of the ethics of belief and what James called religious "overbeliefs" is outside the purview of this book, my own work in this area has aimed to provide a virtue-theoretic account of permissivism, an account I term doxastic responsibilism (Axtell 2006, 2011a, 2011b, 2013, 2018, 2019). 19 Examples of philosophers taking these positions are McCain (2008) for phenomenological conservativism, and Fantl (2018) and Tucker (2010) for dogmatism. 20 Mutualism as a moral and epistemological thesis about mutual recognition of reasonableness seems to falls under permissivism. But when it is mutualist exclusivism, it is akin to a claim of 32 holding purely negative rights, rights that one cares only about their own, but allows to others also not on principle of desert, but only pragmatically, to secure their own. Dogmatism and phenomenological foundationalism are two examples of the mutualist exclusivism that is selftitled as dogmatism or as phenomenological foundationalism. Both seem to be in bad faith in regard to people's mutual recognition as each other as reasonable; for they grant the point only in order to justify the reasonableness of each person in denying any positive epistemic status to beliefs contrary to their own. Mutual steadfastness is a term we can use for the claim that higher order evidence, including evidence of peer disagreement, need not be taken as being epistemically significant. The agent is fully reasonable in maintaining their pre-existing degree of confidence towards the first-order propositions that the disagreement is about. This claim may be permissivist if qualified to that it need not have such an impact. Few defenders of steadfastness claim we should never allow higher-order evidence to change first-order views antecedently held. But strong religious fideism and the broader position simply called "dogmatism" seem to me to come close to embracing this absurdity. I would remind the reader of Jean Jacques Rousseau's famous claim, "Those who would separate civil from theological intolerance are, to my mind, mistaken. The two are inseparable." In development of this, William James spoke of the spirit of inner toleration that empiricism promotes, and that he hoped a science of religion together with philosophy of religion could promote: "No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one another's mental freedom: then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, and which is empiricism's glory; then only shall we live and let live, in speculative as well as in practical things." 33 21 The appeal to supernatural or final causes as trumping any and all philosophical and scientific standards of epistemic risk does not provide an avenue for by-passing inductive normativity as based on shared, observable proximate causes. It always carries the rider, 'in the home religion but not others,' which is itself an asymmetry that demands neutral criteria if not to be seen as but an article of faith. This is a retreat from reason and accountability for faith-based commitments. Such theologically cast, religion-specific appeals to final causes as discounting shared, neutral evidence, are inevitably claims that 'the pattern stops here'; but doing so marks it as an authority-based claim or a fideistic article of faith. This objectively, i.e., in the shared natural and social world we inhabit, increases the alethic and epistemic (and potentially also, moral) riskiness of the faith ventures based on such assumptions. One can say that 'metaphysics is first philosophy,' but from the interest of neutrality where truth claims need to be justified and not simply assumed, this as I argue is descriptively an instance of testimonial authority assumption, a clear marker of religious fideism. 22 Employment of such informal fallacies points us to the rhetorical dimensions of the 'culture wars' over science and religion, and typically to voices defending the least defensible positions on each side of the debate. When I refer to our 'culture wars' over science and religion, this should not be taken to suggest that I support a Conflict or 'warfare' model. Indeed I defend a Dialogue model and try to develop its advantages in Axtell (2013). 23 Thagard (2011), 164. Ken Manktelow (2012) explains how centrally important in experimental psychology is the distinction between reasoning and thinking. It makes possible the testing of 34 agents against logical norms – the Normative-Descriptive Gap – and the better recognition of heuristic strategies and ecological on the part of agents rather than ideal rationality. The "new paradigm" as Manktelow and other psychologists describe it aims to integrate the study of reasoning and decision-making. It recognizes lots of traffic between the traditional precincts of theoretical and practical reason. My complaint about a lot of what goes under epistemology of disagreement fails to make these crucial distinction. The objection I would make is that whether they hail from skeptical or religious evidentialism, the broader approach that they take is extensionally inadequate. Evidentialists like Richard Feldman I think do so by reducing human thinking to an argument model. Christian evidentialists like Richard Swinburne and phenomenal foundationalists like Kevin McCain (2018) do so by reducing norms of good evidential reasoning to simple conservation of the agent's phenomenological seemings. As Paul Sands rightly points out, "One might say that evidentialism sacrifices faith on the altar of probabilism, while fideism substitutes self-assertion for adjudication when challenged by religious pluralism" (147). Note that the objections I present (2011) to Feldman and Conee's explicitly epistemic evidentialism are meant to be complemented by my direct response (Axtell 2018) to the overweaning moral evidentialism of Scott Aikin and Rob Talisse (2018). Both parties I think misapply the Rational Uniqueness Thesis to the epistemology of controversial views, but I can only hope to write a book on these issues in the near future. 24 Kidd (2016), 183. 25 Kidd notes the ubiquity of "vice-charging" in social contexts outside of religion, acknowledging that it can often be intended to promote responsibility. Kidd's distinction is valid 35 in many contexts, but may be less clear where religious value attributions reflect religious teachings and alternative theological methods. Part of the asymmetry between religious luck attributions is that while the in-group's good luck is usually attributed to God's will, the religious outsider's bad religious luck is typically attended with vice-charging. Still, there are definite differences in the extent to which adherents of alternative models of faith are committed to interfaith dialogue, and to positive as contrasted with merely negative apologetics. 26 The concept of confabulation should be related back to our discussion of contingency anxiety in Chapter 1. Contingency anxiety could be taken as descriptive of what agents self-report, but when one adopts a normative conception of rationality and applies it to experimental design, we are using a normative account of rationality. What should induce some contingency anxiety, as we discussed with the epistemic location thought experiments, is ignoring formal symmetries of belief acquisition and maintenance with epistemic peers. Arguably, the failure of rationality in the agent who identifies religious truth with content such that etiological challenges are like water off a duck's back, is a failure to abide by inductive norms that operate in other domains of our social world. 27 For new work in virtue-theoretic approaches in philosophy of religion, see Callahan and O'Connor eds. (2014). One strong overlap between Vainio and myself is a strong emphasis on virtue theory as championing diachronic, in contrast to only synchronic justification of beliefs (Vainio 2010, 142-3; Axtell 2011). Of course this is consistent with naturalism's focus on the reliable etiology of belief, which in turn makes inductive norms salient for all forms of a posteriori knowledge. Vainio finds that "in religion people rarely if ever use synchronic 36 justification for their beliefs. The synchronic view of religious beliefs is like a static snapshot, whereas the diachronic view takes beliefs as a sort of narrative that develops over time....The belief system does not rest on a single basis but it is a complex mixture of experiences, truth claims, witnesses, and other data." (143). I take this to correctly hold that beliefs core to one's religious identity needs to be supported holistically, not atomistically or as a matter of 'synchronic fit.' That is a view I have also defended. 28 Vainio makes this point clearly, as did Thomas D. Carroll (2008) in another careful, historically informed discussion. As Vainio comments, "to Carroll the problems regarding the concepts of fideism are due to its common pejorative use, the lack of historical precision...and the complex philosophical background of the concept itself" (3). Vainio seems to note, but I would emphasize, that those for whom the term is used in a pejorative way are not just those with a skeptical bent, but often those to whom one in historical perspective one might suppose to fit its objective description. This is pure Alvin Plantinga, who seems to me rhetorically to define "fideism" by its most anti-rationality extreme, in order to easily dismiss the description of reformed theology as a form of fideism. 29 Ninian Smart, Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1995). "Interfaith movements can engage fundamentalism in a more positive fashion. 'Fundamentalism' functions as a heuristic device teasing into relief typological 'family resemblances' that unite religious protest movements across the globe. Militant Zionism, political Islam, Hindu nationalism, and sectarian Buddhism all share 'generic characteristics' that invite comparative treatment. Using 'fundamentalism' as a cross-cultural analytical category, this 37 approach views fundamentalism not as an aberration but as one religious phenomenon among others." http://www.crosscurrents.org/Huff.htm 30 James W. Jones (2013, 391-392). "Religions almost always idealize and sanctify some ideas, beliefs, institutions, books, codes of conduct, or various leaders.... So denoting something as sacred appears to have significant emotional and behavioral consequences even when that something is the jihad, ending abortion, turning the United States into a biblical theocracy, restoring the boundaries of biblical Israel, purifying the Hindu homeland, or converting the Tamils to Buddhism." 31 Juergensmeyer (2003, 242). That religious studies scholars and theologians themselves may refer to an active role of religious imagination in the fostering and transmission of religious ideas does not assume that personality traits are sufficient for understanding why people adopt or do not adopt religious orientations. No single factor could explain something as complex as religious orientation or religious radicalization, but individual factors can still play an important role. Social-psychological analyses may be necessary to understand things like ritual identity, religious violence, etc., even though not sufficient. Religious imagination from any scholarly approach needs to be recognized as playing a role in the home religion if it is seen as playing a role in alien religions. But too often talk of imagination, like talk of historical critical methods of scriptural interpretation, is rejected outright by those of fundamentalism orientation because inconsistent with the literalism and inerrantism of their view. 38 32 See Fricker, M. (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. On the psychological and epistemic motivations for religious violence, see also Marbaniang 2008. 33 McKim (2012), 152. 34 As one theologian aptly put it, I do not believe in miracles because I have proved them, but I forever try to prove them because I believe them. 35 One might think here of Mill's Method of Difference as an inductive norm. 36 Quassim Cassam's approach to "the epistemology of terrorism and counter-terrorism" (2018, forthcoming) focuses not on prediction, but on "making the turn to violence intelligible in specific cases...without any expectation of general laws or the ability to predict violence. It works backwards from effects to causes and, instead of positing generic psychological mechanisms to explain why some people carry out acts of terrorism, emphasizes the extent to which pathways to terrorism tend to be highly individual, idiosyncratic and contingent." The holy of counterterrorism he says has been "prediction, and governments and intelligence agencies are attracted by the idea that radicalisation predicts political violence. [On this view] ... the key to explaining the turn to political violence is to understand 'the radicalisation process.'" By contrast, as a self-described epistemic particularist Cassam thinks that there is no general answer to the question of what leads persons to turn to political violence. While I worry that epistemic particularism shares the content-focused 'can't compare across traditions' thesis with post-liberal theologians, and against CSR, Cassam makes a useful distinction that may bring us 39 closer: "In its most extreme form epistemic particularism would deny the existence of any interesting generalisations about the turn to political violence. In its more moderate form epistemic particularism allows that there may be such generalisations but insists that they are of limited value when it comes to understanding the actions of a specific individuals." 37 Rawlsian "reasonable pluralism" I see as based negatively upon the burdens of judgment, and positively on agents' holistic reasons for adopting a religious identity, whether in a testimonial faith tradition or something less traditional but still potentially a "comprehensive doctrine" covering all recognize values within a systematically articulated system or worldview. It is important to note that the argument for Rawlsian reasonable comprehensive conceptions is explicitly political, and that the burdens of judgment are epistemic. Now Rawls and Rorty both do connect the dialogical principles or criteria of reciprocity that supports behind pluralism to a demand for "privatization" of religious belief in the sense of it being just to keep religious belief out of the public sphere. But that is a different argument and one that should not rely on such broad generalizations. The personal and the private are not the same, and personal or experiential aspects of spirituality do not subjectivize the object of faith, or contrast it with collective life. Both authors should be seen as adhering to what Rorty calls the "Jeffersonian Compromise," though they both perhaps exaggerate how directly relevant their describing religion as, in a liberal democracy, a personal search for perfection, answers that question of religion and politics. Much debate about democracy and moral paternalism, the establishment clause, and other questions would have to come between. So my presentation of the inductive risk account, and my use of the Rawlsian notion of "reasonable pluralism" is largely neutral to that whole debate about the place of religion in the public sphere. 40 38 Partly what is meant by "radical" fideism is an absolutistic bent, whether it be more cognitive (demand for creedal assent) or practical (demand that everyone live under Sharia law). 39 Kierkegaard continues, "For I should very much like to know how one would bring Abraham's act into relation with the universal, and whether it is possible to discover any connection whatever between what Abraham did and the universal ... except the fact that he transgressed it." 40 Brunner 1937, 155. See Blanshard's (Chapter vii) discussion of Brunner and Barth's central role in the post-liberal turn. 41 Bernard Williams, "Tolerance: An Impossible Virtue?" Many fundamentalists traditionally viewed politics as anathema and were isolationist, but may have displayed benevolent attitudes when circumstances forced their interaction with broader society. 42 It appears that "friendly" atheism and theism (see Greco 2008) may be described as a de facto position independent of a de jure one. For instance, say that I hold that evidence and argument best supports theism (or atheism), but not that others, given the trait-dependence of both of our views, are necessarily unreasonable or outside their intellectual rights to hold a contrary view. One of the best things about contraries is that they can both be wrong! I see no reason why a narrow-target de jure objection like our own against exclusivism cannot be combined with a de facto objection to theism that find no justification for censuring theism, or deism, or pantheism, 41 etc. more generally. Indeed, such a combination may be how Rawlsian reasonable pluralism is best motivated, since Rawls' view is permissivist, yet has the 'teeth' to censure the unreasonability of the those who eschew their burdens of judgment the putting the culturally particular above the universal: those 'discontents' of Rawlsian reasonable pluralism. 43 Montaigne, Essays book 1.9, ebooks@Adelaide. 44 I do not find comparative philosophers of religion to be drawing as readily as they might from the empirical studies of CSR. From the other direction, "religious orientation" as studied by psychologists proceeds without the focus on symmetry or asymmetry of trait-ascriptions that philosophy of luck/risk brings to bear. But the new research questions that I hope will serve to more closely connect these two fields of study are ones we have already laid the basis for: they are questions informed by close study of how religious groups make and justify asymmetrical ascriptions of religious truth or value to group insiders and outsiders. They connect with problems of religious luck, and still more directly with modes of belief acquisition and maintenance that are cognitively unsafe (because inductively risky), or morally dubious (because of the attitudes towards religious outsiders they engender, and the irresponsibility of risking others besides oneself through one's doxastic faith ventures).