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Permissible Faith Ventures

A Review of John Bishop’s Believing by Faith: An Essay on the Epistemology and the Ethics of Religious Belief, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007, 250 + xii pp., ISBN: 978-0-19-920554-7

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Notes

  1. I would add that the epistemologies offered by some evangelical Christians and other conservative theistic philosophers and theologians tend to be isolationist by embracing versions of epistemic relativism, subjectivism, and other isolationist epistemologies. For a recent example of such an isolationist epistemology, see William Abraham, Crossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006). Abraham defends, perhaps unwittingly, an isolationist epistemology. I argue in ‘Metaepistemology and Divine Revelation’, The Heythrop Journal (forthcoming) that Abraham insulates Christian theological claims from epistemic scrutiny by defending a version of epistemic relativism.

  2. Rational empiricist evidential practice assumes a standard practice of inferential evidential support, and only allows incorrigible, self-evident, and perceptual truths acquired under normal conditions as basically evident (see pp. 66–76).

  3. John Heil, ‘Believing Reasonably,’ Noûs 26 (1992), 47–68, at p. 48.

  4. It is worth noting that in his earlier work on religious epistemology, Bishop did seem to be defending a position that echoes some of Heil’s sentiments about broad rationality. See John Bishop, ‘Faith as Doxastic Venture,’ Religious Studies 38 (2002), 471–87, at pp. 472–73, 475–76.

  5. See Andrei A. Buckareff, ‘Can Faith be a Doxastic Venture?’, Religious Studies 41 (2005), 435–45. Bishop replied to me in his paper, ‘On the Possibility of Doxastic Venture: A Reply to Buckareff’, Religious Studies 41 (2005), 447–51.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank John Bishop for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this review. He has spared me from making many embarrassing mistakes. Any errors that may remain are entirely my own fault.

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  1. Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Marist College, Poughkeepsie, NY, USA

    Andrei A. Buckareff

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Correspondence to Andrei A. Buckareff.

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Buckareff, A.A. Permissible Faith Ventures. SOPHIA 48, 85–90 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-008-0082-3

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