This paper advocates for a “social turn" in religious epistemology. Part One reviews some familiar skeptical arguments targeting religious belief (the argument from luck, the argument from peer disagreement, Hume's argument). All these skeptical arguments say that testimonial evidence cannot give religious belief adequate support or grounding, especially in the context of conflicting evidence. Part Two considers some recent work in social epistemology and the epistemology of testimony. Several issues regarding the nature of testimonial evidence are (...) considered, and an account of testimonial evidence as a means of distribution of information through the system is defended. Part Three uses the results of Part Two to reconsider the skeptical arguments in Part One. (shrink)

An adequate account of testimonial knowledge in general explains how religious knowledge can be grounded in testimony, and even in the context of conflicting testimonial traditions. Three emerging trends in epistemology help to make that case. The first is to make a distinction between two projects of epistemology: “the project of explanation” and “the project of vindication.” The second is to emphasize a distinction between knowledge and understanding. The third is to ask what role the concept of knowledge (...) plays in our conceptual-linguistic economy. Each of these trends, it is argued, helps us to make progress in the epistemology of testimony, and by application in the epistemology of religious belief. (shrink)

An adequate account of testimonial knowledge in general explains how religious knowledge can be grounded in testimony, and even in the context of conflicting testimonial traditions. Three emerging trends in epistemology help to make that case. The first is to make a distinction between two projects of epistemology: “the project of explanation” and “the project of vindication.” The second is to emphasize a distinction between knowledge and understanding. The third is to ask what role the concept of knowledge (...) plays in our conceptual-linguistic economy. Each of these trends, it is argued, helps us to make progress in the epistemology of testimony, and by application in the epistemology of religious belief. (shrink)

Quakers express their faith by refraining from war, often actively opposing it. In modern Quakerism, this is known as the ‘Peace Testimony’. This commonly has a negative and positive construal: it is seen as a testimony against war, and as a testimony to the possibility and goodness of peaceful lives. This paper offers an account of how these aspects of the Peace Testimony are unified in and grounded on a corporate experience of being led by God (...) into a way of life that renders war unthinkable. My goal is to make sense of Friends’ activism in light of their religious experience and to introduce some ideas from Quaker practical theology to philosophers and theologians more generally. I begin by considering the role of what Rachel Muers calls ‘negative testimony’ in Quaker peace work, arguing that we risk misunderstanding this work if we do not see the unity of the Peace Testimony’s negativity and Friends’ positive peace-making endeavors. I then turn to the Testimony’s ground, which I claim can be nothing other than an experience of direct revelation. I conclude by arguing that prominent objections to pacifism, such as Elizabeth Anscombe’s, hold little weight against the Peace Testimony. (shrink)

That testimony is one of the principle bases on which many people hold their religious beliefs is hard to dispute. Equally hard to dispute is that our world contains an array of mutually incompatible religious traditions each of which has been transmitted down the centuries chiefly by way of testimony. In light of this latter it is quite natural to think that there is something defective about holding religious beliefs primarily or solely on the basis (...) of testimony from a particular tradition. The present chapter takes up the question of what that defect consists in. I first consider whether religious diversity entails that a religious believer’s testimony-based beliefs are not formed in a suitably epistemically reliable manner even conditional upon the truth of her religion. After casting doubt on this thought I turn to look at the idea that testimony-based beliefs are subject to defeaters in light of awareness of religious diversity, and I suggest that many such beliefs are not obviously so. According to my diagnosis the problem, rather, is that believers who base their religious beliefs just on testimony will be very unlikely to have reflective (that is, second-order) knowledge even if they possess first-order knowledge, and I explain why this is a notable shortcoming. (shrink)

The author discusses the mode of introduction of religious testimonial knowledge as a response to skepticism. It is argued that Professor Greco's Answer to The Argumentfrom Peer Disagreement (Part Three; Application to the three skeptical arguments) requires accepting the thesis that has the same conceptual grounding as the skeptical statements about the impossibility to share any belief. Taking into account this common grounding, it is desirable to explain the statement “A major motivation for anti-skepticism about testimony is anti-skepticism (...) in general" (Part Two). The theory of religious testimonial knowledge uses the statement, which can be grounded by accepting the Mental Holism. However, the Mental Holism is also a possible grounding for some skeptical theses. Thus, a philosopher who assumes religious testimonial knowledge takes not only an anti-skeptical position, but also can take a “proto-skeptical" position. (shrink)

I outline what I call the ‘deniability problem’, explain why it is problematic, and identify the range of utterances to which it applies (using religious discourse as an example). The problem is as follows: To assign content to many utterances audiences must rely on their contextual knowledge. This generates a lot of scope for error. Thus, speakers are able to make assertions and deny responsibility for the proposition asserted, claiming that the audience made a mistake. I outline the problem (...) (a limited version of which Fricker 2012 discusses), before explaining why it is problematic. Firstly it blocks testimonial knowledge according to assurance views. Secondly it prevents epistemic buck passing (the importance of which is emphasized by Goldberg 2006 and McMyler 2013). Finally, it removes a key disincentive to dishonesty. The recent literature on context sensitivity (particularly Cappelen and Lepore 2004) seems to entail that the problem applies to a very wide range of utterances. I consider a series of responses which fail to provide a solution, but which help us narrow down the scope of the problem. (shrink)

there seems to be some kind of asymmetry, at least in some cases, between moral testimony and non-moral testimony, between aesthetic testimony and non-aesthetic testimony, and between religious testimony and non-religious testimony. In these domains, at least in some cases, we object to deference, and for this reason expect people to form their beliefs on non-testimonial grounds, in a way that we do not object to deference in paradigm cases of testimonial knowledge. (...) Our philosophical puzzle is therefore: what explains these (apparent) asymmetries (or are they merely apparent)? My aim here is to criticize three accounts of these testimonial asymmetries and to suggest an alternative strategy for solving our puzzle. I’ll consider the idea that testimony cannot be a source of understanding (§2), the idea that testimony cannot be a source of acquaintance (§3), and the idea that testimonial belief is not conducive to moral virtue (§4). These accounts all explain the badness of testimonial belief, in the relevant cases, by appeal to its consequences for the believer—respectively, a lack of understanding, acquaintance, or moral virtue. I’ll conclude by suggesting a way forward (§5): we should try to understand the badness of testimonial belief, in the relevant cases, as deriving from its consequences for the believer’s society. (shrink)

It is sometimes claimed that faith is a virtue. To what extent faith is a virtue depends on what faith is. One construal of faith, which has been popular in both recent and historical work on faith, is that faith is a matter of taking oneself to have been spoken to by God and of trusting this purported divine testimony. In this paper, I argue that when faith is understood in this way, for faith to be virtuous then it (...) must be accompanied by intellectual humility. I defend this view by showing how someone ought to respond to purported divine testimony if her faith is to be intellectually humble, and how, if it fails in this respect, it will instead be accompanied by the vices of either servility or arrogance. (shrink)

For many Christians, personal experiences of God provide an important ground or justification for accepting the truth of the gospel. But we are sometimes mistaken about our experiences, and followers of other religions also provide impressive testimonies to support their religious beliefs. This book explores from a philosophical and theological perspective the viability of divine encounters as support for belief in God, arguing that some religious experiences can be accepted as genuine experiences of God and can provide evidence (...) for Christian beliefs. (shrink)

A proof is offered that aims to show that there can be no knowledge of God, excluding knowledge based on natural theology, without divine self-testimony. Both special and general revelation, if they occur, would be forms of divine self-testimony. It is argued that this indicates that the best way to model such knowledge of God is on the basis of an analogy with knowledge gained through testimony, rather than perceptual models of knowledge, such as the prominent model (...) defended by Plantinga. Appropriate causal chains and reliable cognitive processes only seem at best to ensure that a belief proposed for acceptance is the belief the testifier wants accepted; they do not ensure that it is rational to accept the belief. This particularly applies where there is much at stake, where it seems rational to seek some form of evidence, if available. Some brief comments are made on Trinitarian self-testimony. Another model of the ‘inner witness’ is briefly sketched out, based on the analogy with conscience. This model may capture some of the features of Plantinga’s approach, but leaves room for a free rejection of divine self-testimony, in a way that the perceptual analogy does not. A point connected to Plantinga’s aims is then made about the link between evidence, value and divine self-testimony, in relation to religious experience. Finally, it is suggested that the earlier proof may apply in a particular sense to all knowledge of God, including that based on natural theology. (shrink)

How can we, as individuals and as members of religious, educational, and/ or social institutions, more adequately respond to the crises of sexual abuse that have come to light in recent years? This paper will address this question through the philosophical lens of Paul Ricoeur. The argument proposed here is that through Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of testimony, responsibility, and recognition, we can begin to approach, address, and evaluate the crises of sexual abuse we face by grounding our ethical reflections, (...) and actions, within a more robust philosophical framework. Therefore, this paper will proceed as follows. The first three sections will investigate Ricoeur’s writings in order to glean from them three distinct hermeneutical approaches to three different sets of criteria at play in contemporary crises of sexual abuse: first, a hermeneutics of testimony, related to memory and history; second, a hermeneutics of responsibility, related to authority and justice; and, finally, a hermeneutics of recognition, related to forgiveness and forgetting. Insofar as each of these hermeneutical approaches offers us some insight into the problematics underlying crises of sexual abuse, the fourth section will offer an evaluation of these approaches by focusing on the specific case of the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. The final section will consider possible avenues for resolution of these crises through Ricoeur’s notion of exceptional “states of peace,” at the heart of which lies mutual recognition. My hope is that this contribution provides new avenues for conversation and deliberation, as well as new resources and frameworks for articulating and implementing responsible action in the face of sexual abuse. (shrink)

In philosophy of religion, when, if ever, is it better to philosophically engage one another as advocates of competing religions (or secular naturalism) as opposed to conducting a more detached philosophical investigation of each other’s actual religious convictions? We offer a narrative overview of a philosophy of religion seminar we participated in, highlighting questions about the possibility of even understanding persons of different religions and considering when, if ever, one’s own religious convictions should be put on exhibit in (...) teaching philosophy of religion. We defend a “middle path,” advocating the permissibility of some disclosure of religious convictions, but with an openness to role play and a passionate commitment to impartiality in class discussion and grading. This middle path lies in between advocacy models (such as Peter Moser’s, Eleonore Stump’s, and Merold Westphal’s) and more strict neutrality models (such as Michael Rea’s). (shrink)

Is religious faith consistent with being an intellectually virtuous thinker? In seeking to answer this question, one quickly finds others, each of which has been the focus of recent renewed attention by epistemologists: What is it to be an intellectually virtuous thinker? Must all reasonable belief be grounded in public evidence? Under what circumstances is a person rationally justified in believing something on trust, on the testimony of another, or because of the conclusions drawn by an intellectual authority? (...) Can it be reasonable to hold a belief on a topic over which there is significant, entrenched disagreement among informed inquirers, or should such disagreement lead all parties to modify or suspend their own judgments? Is there anything about faith that exempts it from measurement against such epistemic norms? And if we would so evaluate it, how exactly should we understand the intellectual commitments faith requires? The volume's introduction provides a roadmap of the central issues and controversies as currently discussed by philosophers. In fourteen new essays written to engage nonspecialists as well as philosophers working in religion and epistemology, a diverse and distinguished group of thinkers then consider the place of intellectual virtue in religious faith, exploring one or more of the specific issues noted above. (shrink)

Epistemological questions about the significance of disagreement have advanced in concert with broader developments in social epistemology concerning testimony, the nature of expertise and epistemic authority, the role of institutions, group belief, and epistemic injustice (among others). During this period, related issues in the epistemology of religion have reemerged as worthy of new consideration, and available to be situated with new conceptual tools. This volume explores many of the issues at the intersection of the epistemology of disagreement and (...) class='Hi'>religious epistemology: in particular, how to think carefully about religious diversity and disagreement, balancing epistemic humility with personal conviction, the place of religious belief in our social lives, and how best to think about truths concerning religion. (shrink)

How do we conceptualize distinctions between religious —political territories in the contemporary world when old categories—such as Islam and the West, or dar al-Islam and dar al-harb—precipitate misunderstandings and conflicts? In this essay, I consider Tariq Ramadan's argument that Muslims must enact an intellectual transformation along the lines of Kant's Copernican revolution and thence create concepts—such as the space of testimony —to facilitate interreligious dialogue, cooperation, and respectful contestation. The essay aims to illuminate the nature of Ramadan's political (...) theory and dispel the claim that he is a Muslim Martin Luther; to imagine the contours of a future political-intellectual movement that integrates elements of the European Enlightenment and the Arab Nahda; and to envision how Muslim and non-Muslim political theorists may combat political Manichaeanism without denying the reality and importance of contending ethical visions and political identities. (shrink)

The article considers John Greco's conception of testimonial knowledge that aims to overthrow three sceptical arguments against religious knowledge. Prof. Greco presupposes that a religious community already possesses a true religious belief and its reliability is justified exclusively by means of the reliability of transmission. The author puts this conception into question and presents some sceptical arguments regarding the initial origination of a religious belief and verifying the truth-ness of a religious belief in front of (...) epistemic disagreement problem. In particular, he draws an attention on three moments: 1) difference between inside and outside position as to any religious community, 2) lack of inductive verifying evidence in support of religious knowledge, and 3) difference between origination a belief in a community for the first time and transmission of beliefs already given in a community. The author takes a perspective of an outsider who doesn't belong to any religious community (on the assumption that there are secular communities different from religious ones). Firstly, he suggests another from Greco's version of the “luck argument", which concerns the luck in origination of a belief, not the accidence in spreading it. John Greco solves a problem that arises from argument of luck as far as it regards transmission of beliefs inside a community. The author argues that the genuine problem is to establish an originating source of a religious belief, and taking that into consideration, testimonial evidence cannot eliminate this kind of luck. Secondly, he observes the problem of disagreement among different religious communities. He shows that an outsider doesn't have any epistemic reason to prefer one of the conflicting religious beliefs of different communities, for he doesn't belong to any of them. Thus, the problem of “epistemic peers" still remains unsolved. (shrink)

There is witness, a unique structure, an exception to the rule of being, irreducible to representation, only of the Infinite (OB 146). It is with this excessive phrase that Levinas collects his thoughts on testimony. How are we to understand this excess? If the phrase is excessive, it is not an exaggerated phrase — not a phrase which, by its very exaggeration, would hold that testimony achieves its supreme signification in religious experience. It is not a question (...) here of giving value to the primacy of religious experience over all other experience, but rather a question of showing that religion, understood as the relation to the holy, to what is absolutely separate, is not of the nature of experience — that is, not of the nature of comprehension and thematization, if experience means thematization. The religious manifests no primacy here, but rather an irreducible singularity, an exception. If there is a restriction, it is not to the benefit of an experience, but rather to that which escapes experience, to the benefit of what alone gives rise to no experience. The Infinite is not the witnessed par excellence, the supreme witnessed (the supreme witness falling to the supreme existent), but that to which we can only bear witness and which alone gives rise to a testimony: “testimony does not thematize that of which it is the witness, and as such it can be a witnessing only of the Infinite” (GDT 196–97). That one can bear witness only to the Infinite means that one can bear witness only to that which absolutely escapes experience, which consequently means that “testimony . . . does not presuppose an experience”(GDT 197). (shrink)

Arguing against the prevailing view that Holocaust survivors have come forward only recently to tell their stories,Writing the Holocaust examines the full history of Holocaust testimony, from the first chroniclers confined to Nazi-enforced ghettos to today's survivors writing as part of collective memory. Zoë Waxman shows how the conditions and motivations for bearing witness changed immeasurably. She reveals the multiplicity of Holocaust experiences, the historically contingent nature of victims' responses, and the extent to which their identities - secular or (...) religious, male or female, East or West European - affected not only what they observed but also how they have written about their experiences. In particular, she demonstrates that what survivors remember is substantially determined by the context in which they are remembering. (shrink)

To speak of being religious lucky certainly sounds odd. But then, so does “My faith holds value in God’s plan, while yours does not.” This book argues that these two concerns — with the concept of religious luck and with asymmetric or sharply differential ascriptions of religious value — are inextricably connected. It argues that religious luck attributions can profitably be studied from a number of directions, not just theological, but also social scientific and philosophical. There (...) is a strong tendency among adherents of different faith traditions to invoke asymmetric explanations of the religious value or salvific status of the home religion vis-à-vis all others. Attributions of good/bad religious luck and exclusivist dismissal of the significance of religious disagreement are the central phenomena that the book studies. Part I lays out a taxonomy of kinds of religious luck, a taxonomy that draws upon but extends work on moral and epistemic luck. It asks: What is going on when persons, theologies, or purported revelations ascribe various kinds of religiously-relevant traits to insiders and outsiders of a faith tradition in sharply asymmetric fashion? “I am saved but you are lost”; “My religion is holy but yours is idolatrous”; “My faith tradition is true, and valued by God, but yours is false and valueless.” Part II further develops the theory introduced in Part I, pushing forward both the descriptive/explanatory and normative sides of what the author terms his inductive risk account. Firstly, the concept of inductive risk is shown to contribute to the needed field of comparative fundamentalism by suggesting new psychological markers of fundamentalist orientation. The second side of what is termed an inductive risk account is concerned with the epistemology of religious belief, but more especially with an account of the limits of reasonable religious disagreement. Problems of inductively risky modes of belief-formation problematize claims to religion-specific knowledge. But the inductive risk account does not aim to set religion apart, or to challenge the reasonableness of religious belief tout court. Rather the burden of the argument is to challenge the reasonableness of attitudes of religious exclusivism, and to demotivate the “polemical apologetics” that exclusivists practice and hope to normalize. Lexington Books Pages: 290 978-1-4985-5017-8 • Hardback • December 2018 • $95.00 • (£65.00) 978-1-4985-5018-5 • eBook • December 2018 • $90.00 • (£60.00) ISBN 978-1-4985-5018-5 (pbk: alk. paper) (coming 2020) [Download the 30% personal use Discount Order Form I uploaded for hardcover or e-book, and please ask your library to purchase a copy for their collection.]. (shrink)

The paper is a part of the panel discussion with John Greco about his theory of the transmission of religious knowledge. My goal here is not to argue with Greco's theory, but to find out whether it requires any adjustment. I argue that Greco's theory of the social transmission of knowledge requires the transmitted knowledge to be socially verifiable, that is, to be subject to those means of confirmation that pertain to the social system. Unfortunately, some kinds of (...) class='Hi'>religious knowledge are not socially verifiable; therefore, they cannot be transmitted via Greco's social mechanism. I conclude that Greco's theory turns out to be applicable to the socially verifiable religious testimonies, and not applicable to the rest. (shrink)

Recent decades have seen a fertile period of theorizing within mainstream epistemology which has had a dramatic impact on how epistemology is done. Investigations into contextualist and pragmatic dimensions of knowledge suggest radically new ways of meeting skeptical challenges and of understanding the relation between the epistemological and practical environment. New insights from social epistemology and formal epistemology about defeat, testimony, a priority, probability, and the nature of evidence all have a potentially revolutionary effect on how we understand our (...) epistemological place in the world. Religion is the place where such rethinking can potentially have its deepest impact and importance. Yet there has been surprisingly little infiltration of these new ideas into philosophy of religion and the epistemology of religious belief. -/- Knowledge, Belief, and God incorporates these myriad new developments in mainstream epistemology, and extends these developments to questions and arguments in religious epistemology. The investigations proposed in this volume offer substantial new life, breadth, and sophistication to issues in the philosophy of religion and analytic theology. They pose original questions and shed new light on long-standing issues in religious epistemology; and these developments will in turn generate contributions to epistemology itself, since religious belief provides a vital testing ground for recent epistemological ideas. (shrink)

Although there has been little written to date that speaks directly to problems of religious luck, described in other terms these problems have a long history. Contemporary contributors to the literature have referred to “soteriological luck” (Anderson 2011) “salvific luck” (Davidson 1999) and “religious luck” (Zagzebski 1994). Using “religious” as the unifying term, Part I of this monograph begins with the need a more comprehensive taxonomy. Serious philosophic interest in moral and epistemic luck took hold only after (...) comprehensive taxonomies for those kinds of luck were introduced, but this has not yet been done for religious luck. Even if incomplete, the more comprehensive taxonomy, as introduced in Chapter One enables better diagnostic questions to be raised for researchers. Emerging questions about potentially ‘luck leaning’ attributions of good/bad religious luck, and of the possibility and desirability of “luck free theologies,” are questions which I hope to motivate as of central interest to researchers in philosophy of religion, both secular and religious. The taxonomy highlights why we should take two concerns — with the concept of religious luck and with asymmetric or sharply differential ascriptions of religious value — to be inextricably connected. The connection between attributing good/bad luck and violating inductive norms is easy to see upon reflection. One related distinction common in recent work on epistemic luck is that between benign evidential luck (‘benign’ because consistent with justified belief and knowledge), and malign (positive epistemic status undercutting) veritic luck. How, philosophically, this distinction should be understood is an especially acute problem when it comes to testimonial trust, and to intellectually virtuous or vicious ways of assessing testimonial claims, and sources of claims. So the chapter concludes with development of the case of Tess, as an example of testimonial environmental veritic luck. The Tess case is constructed to be formally analogous to the environmental veritic luck operating in fake barn cases (where visual perception rather than reception of testimony is the source of the agent’s belief). There does seem to be an intrinsic connection between epistemic assessment of the agent’s beliefs and the inductive context in which their own and their religious community’s inquiry takes place. This will allow for some potentially powerful thought experiments in successive chapters, about luck, risk, and questions of epistemic in/justice as they pertain to religious faith ventures. (shrink)

A CONSIDERATION OF J C MACKIE’S CLAIM THAT IT IS NEVER REASONABLE TO ACCEPT TESTIMONY TO THE OCCURRENCE OF A MIRACLE. I ARGUE THAT THIS CLAIM FAILS; BUT, BY EXAMINING THE CONCEPT OF MIRACLE AS A SAVING DISCLOSURE OF GOD, I SHOW WHY THE RATIONALITY OF ACCEPTING MIRACLES ON TESTIMONY IS UNLIKELY TO BE NEUTRALLY ESTABLISHABLE.

In this paper I will critically analyze the first part of David Hume’s argument against miracles, which has been traditionally referred to as the in-principle argument. However, unlike most critiques of Hume’s argument, I will (1) present a view of evidential epistemology and probability that will take into consideration Hume’s accurate observation that miracles are highly improbable events while(2) arguing that one can be within one’s epistemic rights in believing that a miracle has occurred. As for the proper definition of (...) a miracle, I offer the following, which I believe most religious people generally mean when they call an event miraculous: "A miracle is a divine intervention that occurs contrary to the regular course of nature within a significant historical-religious context". Although I am fully aware that this definition has its detractors, it will merely function in this paper as a working definition so that we can come to grips with Hume’s argument. This definition has been. (shrink)

Many highly educated people think religious belief is irrational and unscientific. If you ask a philosopher, however, you'll likely get two answers: most religious belief is rational in some respects and irrational in other respects. In this essay I explain why they think religious belief is rational. In a sequel essay I explain why they think the very same beliefs are irrational.

Zoë Waxman shows how the conditions and motivations for bearing witness changed immeasurably. She reveals the multiplicity of Holocaust experiences, the historically contingent nature of victims' responses, and the extent to which their identities - secular or religious, male or female, East or West European - affected not only what they observed but also how they have written about their experiences. In particular, she demonstrates that what survivors remember is substantially determined by the context in which they are remembering.

As part of his wider critique of the credibility of miraculous testimony, Hume also offers a rather curious argument as to the mutual detriment of conflicting testimony for the miracles of contrary religious worldviews. Scholarship on this aspect of Hume’s reasoning has debated whether or not the considerations are to be understood as essentially probabilistic, and as to whether or not a probabilistic interpretation of the argument is logically valid. The consensus would appear to offer a positive (...) answer to the first question and a negative answer to the second. In this paper I expose a deeper fallacy in Hume’s reasoning that undermines both probabilistic and non-probabilistic readings. My critique is closely based upon analogous considerations in the philosophy of science, and the equally intriguing issue as to the epistemological relevance of conflicting scientific theories throughout the history of science. (shrink)

This book has argued that problems of religious luck, especially when operationalized into concerns about doxastic risk and responsibility, can be of shared interest to theologians, philosophers, and psychologists. We have pointed out counter-inductive thinking as a key feature of fideistic models of faith, and examined the implications of this point both for the social scientific study of fundamentalism, and for philosophers’ and theologians’ normative concerns with the reasonableness of a) exclusivist attitudes to religious multiplicity, and b) theologically-cast (...) but bias-mirroring trait-ascriptions to religious insiders and outsiders. It is important to keep the descriptive/explanatory and normative concerns properly separated, but philosophy of luck and risk are relevant to both. More specifically, inductive risky theological strategies,we have argued, are a relevant concern both descriptively and normatively. The descriptive/explanatory relevance of measures of high inductive risk connects it with cognitive and social psychology of religion, while its normative relevance connects with critical concerns with epistemology of testimony, the epistemology of disagreement, and the ethics of belief. A research program to examine fideistic orientation and its relation to epistemically risky doxastic strategies is one of potentially numerous research programs on which philosophers and psychologists might work collaboratively. So this concluding chapter of our study culminates with the outline of a proposed research program at the intersection of shared concerns. I term this research program CICI, because it examines what lies at the intersection of CSR’s standing interest in the appeal of counter-intuitive ideas, and our own study’s focus on the fideistic penchant for counter-inductive thinking. Religious Studies scholars typically focus on particular traditions and teachings, while CSR scholars tend to eschew such content-focused approaches in favor of a study of evolutionary and hence generic or trans-religious functions and processes. I argue that CICI has the added benefit of effectively mediating this generic-specific contrast between CSR and Religious Studies, allowing CSR research to be more closely connected with and relevant to comparative fundamentalism. (shrink)

One way in which information about the unknown is socialized to children is through adult testimony. Sharing false testimony about others with children may foster inaccurate perceptions and may result in prejudicially based divisions amongst children. As part of a larger study, mothers were instructed to read and discuss an illustrated story about Arab-Muslim refugees from Syria with their 6- to 8-year-olds. Parent-child discourse during two pages of this book was examined for how mothers used Islam as a (...) talking point. Results indicated that only 50% of mothers and 13% of children shared accurate testimony about Islam. However, while 35% of children admitted uncertainty in their knowledge, only 3% of mothers admitted uncertainty. These results highlight the importance of parents sharing the confidence in their knowledge. If parents teach inaccurate information about other religions, it may create a greater divide between children of different religious backgrounds. (shrink)

Hume’s destructive account of miracles has been thought by many to exclude the possibility of rationally accepting testimony to supernatural events. Here I argue that even if one grants that his argument works with respect to testimony about miracles, it does not succeed in showing that all testimony to the supernatural is inadmissible, since room is left open for religious experiences, especially those of an intersubjective kind, to function as evidence. If this is so, there is (...) new reason to think that his exclusion of miracle claims might be unwarranted. (shrink)

Hume’s destructive account of miracles has been thought by many to exclude the possibility of rationally accepting testimony to supernatural events. Here I argue that even if one grants that his argument works with respect to testimony about miracles, it does not succeed in showing that all testimony to the supernatural is inadmissible, since room is left open for religious experiences, especially those of an intersubjective kind, to function as evidence. If this is so, there is (...) new reason to think that his exclusion of miracle claims might be unwarranted. (shrink)

The article examines how recovering drug addicts employ testimonies of conversion and addiction to develop and sustain personal identity and create meaning from varied experiences in life. Drawing on 31 autobiographies of recovering drug addicts we analyze conversion and addiction testimonies in two European contexts. The analysis shows how existing frames of reference and self-understanding are undermined and/or developed. We first describe the substance abuse in participants’ addiction trajectory. Next, we outline the religious aspects and the primary conception of (...) recovering addicts’ conversions as an example of spiritual transformation and narrative change. Moreover, participants select and creatively adapt cultural practices in their testimonies. In many of these examples converts clearly employ elements from their personal and family histories, their ethnic and religious heritages, and their larger cultural and historical context to create a meaningful conversion narrative. (shrink)

Children aged 7 and 11 years were interviewed about death in the context of two different narratives. Each narrative described the death of a grandparent but one narrative provided a secular context whereas the other provided a religious context. Following each narrative, children were asked to judge whether various bodily and mental processes continue to function after death, and to justify their judgment. Children displayed two different conceptions of death. They often acknowledged that functioning ceases at death and offered (...) appropriate biological justifications for that judgment. However, they also claimed that functioning continues after death and offered appropriate religious justifications. The tendency to claim that functioning continues after death was more frequent among older children than younger children, more frequent in the context of the religious narrative as opposed to the secular narrative and more frequent with respect to mental processes than bodily processes. Particularly among older children, two distinct conceptions of death appear to co-exist: a biological conception in which death implies the cessation of living processes and a metaphysical conception in which death marks the beginning of the afterlife. (shrink)

This chapter sharpens the book’s criticism of exclusivist responsible to religious multiplicity, firstly through close critical attention to arguments which religious exclusivists provide, and secondly through the introduction of several new, formal arguments / dilemmas. Self-described ‘post-liberals’ like Paul Griffiths bid philosophers to accept exclusivist attitudes and beliefs as just one among other aspects of religious identity. They bid us to normalize the discourse Griffiths refers to as “polemical apologetics,” and to view its acceptance as the only (...) viable form of pluralism. This reasoning may seem initially plausible, but on closer examination his and other’s defence of the reasonableness of exclusivist responses to religious multiplicity fall apart. Informed by our study of luck-leaning theological explanations of religious difference and the counter-inductive thinking they exemplify, I argue that exclusivist responses to religious multiplicity are best explained by personal and group bias, and that a discourse between exclusivist authors or sects is beyond the pale of reasonable disagreement. Our study of descriptive (psychological) and prescriptive (religious) fideism in the first sections of Chapter Five suggests that we turn back to formal features of doxastic methods (i.e., of how people process), features that may be straightforwardly tested for in studies utilizing scales of religious orientation. These formal features allow us to better recognize not only the multiplicity of models of faith that religious adherents adhere to, but also that the relationship between forms of fideism is scalar: there is a spectrum of views running from rationalism to fideism, and at the fideistic end from moderate to strong forms of religious fideism. I further explain why developing tests and markers for a high degree of fideistic orientation is important to all those who study religion. The second half of the chapter turns to criticism or censure of exclusivist attitudes to religious multiplicity, in contrast to apologetic defenses of exclusivism. While we have examined the close connections between fideism and fundamentalism, and again between fundamentalism and exclusivism in earlier chapters, a sharper focus reveals an important but little-recognized distinction reflected in the literature: the distinction between religion-specific (or particularist) and mutualist exclusivism. The mutualist doesn’t talk just about the right of adherents of one specific religion to assert exclusivism, but the adherents of any and all “home” religions. I argue that some previously unrecognized problems for the reasonableness of exclusivist responses to religious multiplicity are brought to light when we make the distinction between the two basic ways to understand the claim that exclusivists are making. I put particularist (Barth, Lindbeck, Plantinga) and mutualist (Griffiths, Gellman, Margalit, D’Costa) defenses of exclusivism on the horns of a dilemma, and argue that despite the popularity it presently enjoys among post-liberal theologians, a close examination reveals that the very conceptual coherence of mutualist exclusivism is in serious doubt. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

In this study, we ask whether consensus testimony affects children’s judgments of the possibility of improbable and impossible events. Fifty-six U.S. and Chinese 8-year-olds made possibility judgments before and after hearing three speakers affirm or deny the possibility of improbable and impossible events. Results indicated that whereas both U.S. and Chinese children altered their judgments in the direction of the consensus testimony, this effect was stronger for Chinese children. U.S. children were particularly receptive to consensus for improbable events (...) and when the consensus provided correct information, whereas Chinese children were similarly willing to change their judgment regardless of event type and the validity of the testimony. We propose that the extent of the influence of testimony on possibility judgments varies based on cultural setting. Our findings have potential applications for domains that require evaluation of counterintuitive claims, like religious and scientific education. (shrink)

Religious experiences come in a variety of types, leading to multiple taxonomies. One sort that has not received much attention as a distinct topic is what I will call ‘evidentially compelling religious experience’ (ECRE). The nature of an ECRE is such that if it actually occurs, its occurrence plausibly entails the falsity of metaphysical naturalism. Examples of ECREs might include visions / auditions / near-death experiences conveying information the hearer could not have known through natural means, later verified; (...) unambiguously miraculous healings; fulfilled prophecy; supernatural rescues; inter-subjective religious experiences (e.g., multiple people simultaneously having the same vision of the Virgin Mary), etc. After presenting a representative set of published case studies of ECREs, I argue that for most settled metaphysical naturalists (though not all), the combination of a settled metaphysical naturalism with an awareness of the relative commonality of testimony to ECREs is either irrational or immoral. This is because that conjunction entails either an unjust and uncharitable judgement on a great many of those testifying to ECREs (namely that they are liars), or an irrational refusal to acknowledge this entailment. (shrink)