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Three Ways to Improve Religious Epistemology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2017

J. L. Schellenberg*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Mount Saint Vincent University

Abstract

Religious epistemology is widely regarded as being in a flourishing condition. It is true that some very sharp analytical work on religion has been produced by philosophers in the past few decades. But this work, for various cultural and historical reasons, has been kept within excessively narrow bounds, and the result is that the appearance of flourishing is to a considerable extent illusory. Here I discuss three important ways in which improvements to this situation might be made.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2017 

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References

1 For representative discussion, see Dennett, Daniel C. and Plantinga, Alvin, Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

2 For defense of the view that bias infects contemporary philosophy of religion, see Draper, Paul and Nichols, Ryan, ‘Diagnosing Bias in Philosophy of Religion’, The Monist 96 (2013), 420446 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See Schellenberg, J. L., Evolutionary Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See, for example, Barrett, Justin L., Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2004)Google Scholar, Boyer, Pascal, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001)Google Scholar, and Tremlin, Todd, Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 See, for example, Schellenberg, J. L., Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

6 See, for example, Diiller, Jeanine, ‘The Conceptual Focus of Ultimism: An Object of Religious Concern for the Nones and Somes’, Religious Studies 49 (2013), 221233 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Dougherty, Trent and Tweedt, Chris, ‘Religious Epistemology’, Philosophy Compass (2015) 10: doi: 10.1111/phc3.12185 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 See Cohen, L. Jonathan, An Essay on Belief and Acceptance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

9 See Schellenberg, J. L., The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

10 See Schellenberg, J. L., ‘God for All Time: From Theism to Ultimism’, in Buckareff, Andrei and Nagasawa, Yujin (Eds.), Alternative Concepts of God: Essays on the Metaphysics of the Divine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.