Epistemology of Religious Belief

چالش های معرفت شناسانه بسیاری حول توجیه باور به خداوند در سه قرن گذشته وجود داشته است بگونه ای که برخی همچون پلنتینجا صرف تضمین را بجای توجیهِ استدلالی در این زمینه مطرح کردند و باور به وجود خداوند را باوری پایه نشان دادند. اما میلیون ها انسان بدون توجه به این چالش ها، باور به وجود خداوند را بدون آن که ایمان گرا باشند برای خودشان موجه می دانند. این توجیه از کجا ناشی می شود؟ آیا توجیه آنها از لحاظ معرفت شناسی قابل تبیین است؟
در این مقاله در نظر است ضمن تبیین جریانهای جدید معرفت شناسی اجتماعی و «گواهی»، اهمیت معرفت شناسیِ مبتنی بر شنیده های اطمینان یافته نشان داده شود سپس استدلال گردد که شنیده های اطمینان یافتة ما درباره وجود خداوند و صفات او که به پیامبران منتهی می شود و آن نیز به اقرار خداوند و تبیین او از خودش مبتنی است می تواند بهترین توجیه برای باورهای ما باشد. و در نهایت به این سوال پاسخ داده شود که چگونه گواهی خداوند بر وجود و صفاتش که ازطریق پیامبران به ما رسیده است می تواند یکی از بهترین توجیه های معرفتی برای باور به وجود و صفات خداوند باشد؟ و این نوع معرفت شناسی دینی چه مزایایی نسبت به قرینه گرایی و یا صورتهای گوناگون برهان آوری بر وجود خداوند و صفات او می تواند داشته باشد؟

In this paper, I argue that religious belief is epistemically equivalent to mathematical belief. Abstract beliefs don’t fall under ‘naive’, evidence-based analyses of rationality. Rather, their epistemic permissibility depends, I suggest, on four criteria: predict- ability, applicability, consistency, and immediate acceptability of the fundamental axioms. The paper examines to what extent mathematics meets these criteria, juxtaposing the results with the case of religion. My argument is directed against a wide-spread view according to which belief in mathematics is clearly rationally acceptable whereas belief in religion is not. The paper also aims to make some of the implications of contemporary mathematics available to philosophers working in different fields.

It is argued that standard accounts of the epistemology of religious commitment fail to be properly sensitive to certain important features of the nature of religious conviction. Once one takes these features of religious conviction seriously, then it becomes clear that we are not to conceive of the epistemology of religious conviction along completely rational lines. But the moral to extract from this is not fideism, or even a more moderate proposal (such as reformed epistemology) that casts the epistemic standing of basic religious beliefs along non-rational lines. Rather, one needs to recognise that in an important sense religious convictions are not beliefs at all, but that this is compatible with the idea that many other religious commitments are beliefs. This picture of the nature of religious commitment is shown to fit snugly with the Wittgensteinian account of hinge commitments, such that all rational belief essentially presupposes certain basic arational hinge commitments, along lines originally suggested by John Henry Newman. We are thus able to marshal a parity-style argument in defence of religious commitment. Although religious belief presupposes basic arational religious convictions, it is not on this score epistemically amiss since all belief presupposes basic arational convictions, or hinge commitments. The resulting view of the epistemology of religious commitment is a position I call quasi-fideism. "None of us can think or act without the acceptance of truths, not intuitive, not demonstrated, yet sovereign."

This is a defense of evangelical theology for the beginning student. It certainly is also a primer for students already familiar with theology. Contained here–in is a glimpse into the classroom of the authors. This, as closely as possible, is a text of our lectures in Prolegomena. Each chapter covers a central topic or question related to the subject. Each chapter also contains educational aids such as objectives, questions and exercises, vocabulary words, and summaries to help the student master the material. Hence, it is intended to be used with or in preparation for classroom teaching, instruction and learning.

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La crisi del verificazionismo ha messo in movimento l’intero quadro epistemologico. Né le esplorazioni di Wittgenstein né le soluzioni di Plantinga vogliono essere tentativi di arrestare quel movimento. Quasi gli si potrebbe imputare l’obiettivo opposto: favorire certi processi disgreganti dell’eredità post-cartesiana. Il vecchio assetto teorico è percepito come costrittivo contro certe regioni linguistico-filosofiche; bisogna creare un’apertura. Per quel che riguarda la filosofia della religione, le conseguenze profonde del lavoro di wittgensteiniani e riformati sono ancora da sviluppare. Mancano ancora di una stabilizzazione; il cantiera è tutt’ora aperto. Per gli epistemologi riformati, il compito fondamentale sembra l’individuazione di criteri induttivi per stabilire l’adeguatezza del teismo. Per i wittgensteiniani, occorre invece stabilire cosa vuol dire che credere in Dio è stabilire un sistema di riferimento esistenziale, non solo noetico. L’affermazione della realtà divina non sopporta l’isolamento epistemico. Anche una volta che si è ottenuta la percezione chiara che una proposizione teistica non è una linea in più nell’inventario ontologico, occorre ricordare che che non è possibile trattare la religione come un set di credenze isolate (Dio connette con ogni dato di realtà e non solo con ciò che consideriamo essere il contenuto di una proposizione religiosa). Per entrambi, resta poi il nodo delle implicazioni metafisiche. C’è spazio per renderne conto? C’è spazio nella filosofia analitica per parlare di metafisica, senza nulla togliere allo stile concettuale tipico (preminenza dell’analisi e della chiarificazione concettuale, accertamento della coerenza interna, controllo della compatibilità logica…)? La strada è aperta...

My aim in this paper is to critically assess two opposing theses about the epistemology of religious belief. The first one, developed by John Mackie, claims that belief in God can be justified or warranted only if there is a good argument for the existence of God. The second thesis, elaborated by Alvin Plantinga, holds that even if there is no such argument, belief in God can be justified or warranted. I contend that the first thesis is plausibly false, because belief in God is not just like a scientific hypothesis, and the second thesis is likely true if epistemic externalism is the correct view. However, even if the second thesis is true, I argue that to work on good arguments for God’s existence is unavoidable in order to cope with a new version of the Great Pumpkin objection, as well as to achieve other relevant purposes such as to convince rational observers outside the theistic community that belief in God is likely justified or warranted.

An epistemological issue that preoccupied John Henry Newman was the conditions under which Christian belief can be considered rational. As he sought to offer a broader and more refined account of faith and reason, he focused, for example, on the informal nature of reasoning and on the role of personal judgment in assessing evidence. In particular, his approach homed in on how the mind actually works and the conditions under which people reason within various contexts and fields of knowledge.

Along these lines, an important, though complex, issue involves clarifying Newman's position on the grounds of faith. In this respect, Anthony Kenny says the University Sermons contain some of Newman's “very best work on the nature and justification of faith.” However, Newman's position on the grounds of faith in some of the University Sermons is difficult to capture and, perhaps, prone to misunderstanding (e.g., serm. 10). As I hope to show, Newman provides greater clarification of his own position on the grounds of faith in sermon 13 (see also serm. 14).

Accordingly, I will structure this essay in the following way. First,  I will identify some potential misunderstandings in the University Sermons concerning Newman's position on the grounds of faith. Second, I will show how the distinction between implicit and explicit reason in sermon 13 shapes both his rejection of a particular kind of hard rationalism (a religious belief is rational if and only if it can be articulated or demonstrated formally) and his alternative understanding of the grounds of faith. Implicit reason, for Newman, is a spontaneous, unconscious, or unargumentative process of reasoning by which people form beliefs without appealing to explicitly stated grounds; explicit reason is a second-order activity that works out whether beliefs are true rather than false; the former is unreflective, while the latter has a reflective component. Third, I will argue constructively that Newman is best construed as a soft rationalist insofar as he thinks that (1) faith is subject to rational analysis, (2) its process of reasoning is cumulative, though not necessarily formal, in nature, and (3) judgment plays an irreducible role in evaluating evidence and forming arguments. Fourth, I will briefly place Newman's proposal within the contemporary debate between fideism and rationalism.

Les croyances caractérisant la foi chrétienne ne sont pas aussi facilement croyables pour tous. Pourquoi ? Les causes de cette inégalité se laissent étudier à partir du concept de coût épistémique. Ensuite, s'il y a des motivations des personnes en jeu, l'épistémologie des vertus peut les éclairer. Enfin, si Dieu est bien impliqué dans cet état de choses, quelle est son intention en cautionnant ce qui semble être une inégalité des chances ?

Two crucial epistemological issues that preoccupied Newman were the conditions under which Christian belief can be considered rational and the intellectual contours of forming a connected view. His approach homes in on the informal and cumulative nature of reasoning, the role of personal judgement in assessing evidence, and the broadening of one’s intellectual horizons. This chapter also draws attention to an important epistemological question about how the illative sense, as a kind of personal judgement, provides the relevant means to adjudicate one’s own judgement in the midst of other illations. It concludes with three areas that deserve further epistemological attention and development: the role of commitment in forming rational beliefs, the social dimension of the illative sense, and the place of Newman in the modern story of epistemology.

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.

The issue of rationality of religious beliefs belongs to the main problems of 20lh century philosophy of religion. When posing this problem the term ‘rationality’ is often used in a way that is not precise, and sometimes it seems to be ambiguous. In order to avoid this error I define rationality of acceptance regulatively as a property consisting in being in accordance with defined epistemic rules of the ethics of beliefs. The main rule that is taken into consideration here is the following requirement: 'Each theorem p accepted by person S should be justifiable by her in a degree proportional to the degree of confidence with which he accepts p’. Acceptances having the property of so defined rationality belong to a broader class of reasonable acts, where rationality is understood as a property consisting in being a reliable use of human cognitive abilities. I claim that although the religious faith of a ‘common’ Christian is not rational in this sense, as mysteries of faith are not justifiable by natural reason, it has a reasonable character and is precious from the epistemic point of view. I defend the proposition that the fact of not being rational in this particular sense does not involve irrationality that consists in breaking the rule that orders a change in the way of accepting a certain theorem  p so as to adjust the degree of assertion to the justification one has, the borderline case being one of rejecting the theorem for which one does not have any epistemically valid justification. The proposition that one of these rules is obligatory for the believer with respect to his acceptance of the propositions of faith cannot be justified without stating that Christianity is false. This latter proposition cannot be proved philosophically. The classes of epistemic duties of believer and philosopher are different.

From what norms does the ethics of belief derive its virtues and vices, its permissions and censures? Since pragmatists understand epistemology as the theory of inquiry, the paper will try to explain what the aims and tasks are for an ethics of belief, or project of guidance, which best fits with this understanding of epistemology. It will support it with the work of William James and several contemporary pragmatists. This paper approaches the ethics of belief from a focus on responsible risk management, where doxastic responsibility is understood in terms of the degree of riskiness of agents' doxastic strategies, which is in turn most objectively measured through accordance or violation of inductive norms. Doxastic responsibility is attributable to agents on the basis of how epistemically risky was the process or strategies of inquiry salient in the etiology of their belief or in their maintenance of a belief already held. Treating the "doxastic strategies" of individual and collective agents as central to the projects of epistemic assessment results in a significantly different account than either the standard epistemological externalists focus on "processes" in the objectively reliable etiology of belief, or than the standard evidentialist focus on an agent's reflectively available "reasons" which lend the agent a certain kind of personal or subjective justification for her belief.

Tekst  jest  myślowym fragmentem większej 'całości konceptualnej' z epistemologii religii, mającej prezentować internalistyczne i eksternalistyczne uwarunkowania problematyki tzw. racjonalności sądów, przekonań czy wierzeń religijnych. Przedstawiam w nim epistemologiczne uwarunkowania tzw. standardowej koncepcji racjonalności sądów teistycznych, zgodnie z którą warunkiem racjonalnego utrzymywania sądu teistycznego jest ufundowanie go w rozumowaniu filozoficznym lub filozoficzno-naukowym, poprawnym formalnie, którego to rozumowania przesłanki są akceptowane jako prawdziwe przez dowolną osobę. Ujmując rzecz inaczej jest to koncepcja uzależniająca dopuszczalność utrzymywania sądów o Bogu pod warunkiem oparcia ich w argumentach filozoficznych lub filozoficzno-naukowych na istnienie Boga / dowodach na istnienie Boga.  Wskazuję na dwa główne źródła tej koncepcji - to jest na racjonalistyczną teorię uprawomocnienia epistemicznego połączoną z antyirracjonalistyczną postawą wiążącą nadzieję, że myślenie naukowe - intersubiektywne stanie się lekiem na irracjonalizm i przesądy.

This is a semi-final version of paper  in Polish  titled  "Niektóre uwarunkowania epistemologiczne zagadnienia racjonalności sądów dotyczących Boga i standardowego, racjonalistycznego rozwiązania tej kwestii/ Some epistemological determinants of problem of rationality of  theistic belief  and its standard evidentialist solution". The paper will be published in  S. Janeczek, A. Starościc,  eds. Filozofia Boga,  2017. The paper presents two main sources of some contemporary account of rationality of theistic belief - evidentialism with classical foundationalism and second, anti-irrationalism, as social policy concerning proper use of reason and ethics of belief.

This paper argues for a view described as risk-limited indulgent permissivism. This term may be new to the epistemology of disagreement literature, but the general position denoted has many examples. The paper argues for the need for an epistemology for domains of controversial views (morals, philosophy, politics, and religion), and for the advantages of endorsing a risk-limited indulgent permissivism across these domains. It takes a double-edge approach in articulating for the advantages of interpersonal belief permissivism that is yet risk-limited: Advantages are apparent both in comparison with impermissivist epistemologies of disagreement, which make little allowance for the many distinct features of these domains, as well as in comparison with defenses of permissivism which confuse it with dogmatism, potentially making a virtue of the latter. In an appropriately critical form of interpersonal belief permissivism, the close connections between epistemic risk-taking and our doxastic responsibilities become focal concerns.

Our focus will be some prominent ways in which scholars have tried to motivate scepticism about the rationality of religious belief and in the process make a case for atheism. This will lead us in turn to consider how the putative flaws in these sceptical arguments might mitigate against the philosophical case for atheism. Finally, we will consider how fideistic and quasi-fideistic approaches to the epistemology of religious belief might be able to embody a certain kind of scepticism while nonetheless avoiding atheism.

This paper examines religious epistemics in relationship to recent defenses of belief-credence dualism among analytic Christian philosophers, connecting what is most plausible and appealing in this proposal to Wittgenstein's thought on the nature of religious praxis and affectively-engaged language-use. How close or far is Wittgenstein's thought about faith to the analytic Christian philosophers' thesis that "beliefs and credences are two epistemic tools used for different purposes"? While I find B-C dualism appealing for multiple reasons, the paper goes on to raise critical concerns about the manner in which it has been applied to the epistemology of religious belief. I argue that this application is at odds with some of Wittgenstein's best insights, and that it presents a promising but comparatively unbalanced account of religious epistemics.

Believing Jesus is resurrected isn't easy. Even if it did happen, it's not easy for everyone to believe, to truly believe it. Why is that ? That is the problem I hope to elucidate in this essay. To do so, I used three different approaches one can find in philosophy of knowledge : evidentialism, presuppositionalism, and R. Pouivet's virtue epistemology.

В статье представлены основные дискуссии в аналитической эпистемологии религиозной веры, прослеживаются их взаимосвязь и взаимовлияния. Автор показывает, что эпистемология религиозной веры является одной из возможных эпистемологических программ, которые появились в результате критики Э. Геттиером определения знания как обоснованного истинного верования. Поэтому различные направления в рамках религиозной эпистемологии оказываются связанными не только между собой, но и с основными тенденциями в рамках общей эпистемологии. Последовательно разбирая основные тенденции в эпистемологии религиозной веры (реформатская эпистемология, социальная эпистемология, аретическая эпистемология, эпистемология авторитета), автор приходит к выводу, что ядро каждой из них – попытка определения самого феномена религии, а потому религиозная эпистемология может рассматриваться как еще один элемент в многовековом ряду попыток определения сущности религии. Поскольку же определение основных констант религии является основной задачей философии религии (в любой традиции этой дисциплины), постольку эпистемология религиозной веры является сущностной частью философии религии вообще.

The paper presents basic theses of Paul Moser's epistemology of religious beliefs. This author stands against the most popular (among analytical philosophers) models of argumentism and reformed epistemology. He emphasizes that if God is a personal being, then it is up to Him to determine the conditions and aims of His revelation. According to Moser, God's purpose would be to reveal His moral perfection and redemption. This is why it is an experience of being called to a moral conversion by an intentionally acting external agent which is the salient evidence justifying the rationality of theism. New epistemological perspective allows polemics with the hiddenness argument formulated by J.L. Schellenberg. Moser, in his refutation of this argument, shows that the existence of cognitively non-resistant non-believers does not prove God's nonexistence, because lack of cognitive resistance to God is not a sufficient disposition allowing the reception of the transformative gift. The readiness to conform one's own will to the demands of the divine love is a necessary condition for experiencing agapē as a divine self-manifestation.

Jest to nieco zmodyfikowany autoreferat wygłoszony na publicznej obronie rozprawy doktorskiej w Instytucie Filozofii UJ, 29.10.2018. // This is the presentation given during the public defense of my PhD thesis on 29.10.2018, Institute of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow.


English summary



„Sources of faith. The conditions for acquiring religious beliefs in the light of analytic philosophy of religion”


The aim of the dissertation is to analyse the conditions under which people acquire religious beliefs (to describe the circumstances, in which their religious faith is born), in the light of several philosophical theories dealing with the subject of religious faith. The results of the project are twofold: first, the multidimensional, deepened understanding of how religious faith is born; second, the explanation why particular theories look at this phenomenon in their own specific way and what assumptions they make. I also point out that the description of the conditions for acquiring religious beliefs is always connected with the attempt to explain why some people do not form such beliefs
(to explain how faith arises is to explain why – sometimes – it does not arise).
In the first chapter, I reconstruct a theory of religious beliefs as aspect seeing, inspired by the work of later Wittgenstein. In the second chapter, my analyses focus on the conception which points to the experience of one's conscience as a way to know God. The third chapter is devoted to the hypothesis of sensus divinitatis, the sense of divinity, which allows one to form religious beliefs. Chapter four revolves around the conception of 'theistic natural signs', which refer the individual who experiences them to the reality of God. I show how each hypothesis about the sources of faith is intertwined with the attempt to explain the phenomenon of religious unbelief.
Chapter five concentrates on developing a fundamental vision of how religious beliefs arise; the vision which underlies all the theories analysed in chapter 1-4. This vision consists of three main elements. First, a subject forms religious beliefs as a result of contact with some object or phenomenon ('metaphysical' condition for faith), or as a result of having certain experiences ('epistemic' condition), due to the fact that it has an adequate cognitive faculty or disposition to form such beliefs ('relational' condition). Particular conceptions of the sources of faith fill these conditions in their own ways. I stress that each of the conceptions also provides an explanation for religious unbelief: according to them, religious beliefs do not appear, because one of the aforementioned conditions is not satisified. Usually this is due to the destructive effects of human sin.
In the sixth chapter, I underline the role that metaphysical fact of God's existence (or nonexistence) plays in explaining why religious beliefs appear. Basing myself on the conceptions from chapters 1-4, and, additionally, the argument from Divine Hiddenness, as presented by J. Schellenberg, I conlude that the way one approaches the question of the sources of faith and how one assessess the phenomenon of unbelief, depends on one's stance on the question of whether God exists.

If I have only one apple and you give me one more apple, the only rational doxastic attitude to have toward the proposition (p), "Layla has two apples now," is that p is true. On the other hand, to the proposition (q), "Prophet Muhammad designated a successor," I believe there can be more than one rational doxastic attitude toward q. And, that when it comes to religious disagreements, this is almost always the case. So, in this paper, I advance an alternative epistemology to what has come to be know as the Uniqueness Thesis. Uniqueness is the view that for any proposition, p, and any body of evidence, E, exactly one doxastic attitude is the rational one to have toward p based on E. My view, which I call the Pluralist Thesis, and which I defend in this paper, is that for any proposition p and any body of evidence, E, there can be more than one rational doxastic attitude toward p on the basis of E.

Alvin Plantinga (1993a, 1993b, 2000) argues that de jure objections to theism depend on de facto objections: in order to say that belief in God is not warranted, one should first assume that this belief is false. Assuming Plantinga’s epistemology and his de facto/de jure distinction, In this essay, I argue that to show that belief in miracles is not warranted, one must suppose that belief in miracles is always false. Therefore, a person who holds a skeptical position regarding miracles must choose either to find evidence that all of the supposed miracles are false, or admit that one is assuming an areligious commitment as a starting point.

Many Christian traditions affirm a doctrine of assurance. According to this doctrine, those who are saved have assurance of their own salvation; that is, the doctrine of assurance tells us that the elect can know their status as elect. In this paper, I explore two developments of the doctrine of assurance by theologians (i.e. John Calvin & Kenneth Keathley) and argue that they fail to accommodate the fallibilistic nature of human knowing. I then develop a fallibilistic doctrine of assurance, which makes such assurance available to most Christians, and respond to an objection from the camp of pragmatic encroachment.

While some philosophical models reduce religious faith to either mere belief or affect, more recent accounts have begun to look at the volitional component of faith. In this spirit, John Bishop has defended the notion of faith as a ‘doxastic venture’. In this article, I consider Bishop's view in detail and attempt to show that his account proves on the one hand too permissive and on the other too restrictive. Thus, although the doxastic-venture model offers certain advantages over other prominent views in the philosophy of religion, it still falls short of providing us with an ultimately satisfactory account of religious faith.

In questo lavoro ci proponiamo di ripercorrere i passi fondamentali che costituiscono il percorso di analisi della cultura e, nello specifico, dell’origine e del diffondersi delle credenze religiose, alla luce di una specifica teoria dell’evoluzione della cultura, la memetica.  L’obbiettivo finale è quello di ricercare quali possano essere state le cause della nascita di credenze religiose, che si traduce, evoluzionisticamente, in due domande fondamentali: Quali meccanismi del cervello permettono di generare la credenza in un agente sovrannaturale? E perché queste credenze sono così importanti per gli esseri umani?

From what norms does the ethics of belief derive its virtues and vices, its permissions and censures? Since pragmatists understand epistemology as the theory of inquiry, the paper will try to explain what the aims and tasks are for an ethics of belief, or project of guidance, which best fits with this understanding of epistemology. It will support it with the work of William James and several contemporary pragmatists. This paper approaches the ethics of belief from a focus on responsible risk management, where doxastic responsibility is understood in terms of the degree of riskiness of agents' doxastic strategies, which is in turn most objectively measured through accordance or violation of inductive norms. Doxastic responsibility is attributable to agents on the basis of how epistemically risky was the process or strategies of inquiry salient in the etiology of their belief or in their maintenance of a belief already held. Treating the "doxastic strategies" of individual and collective agents as central to the projects of epistemic assessment results in a significantly different account than either the standard epistemological externalists focus on "processes" in the objectively reliable etiology of belief, or than the standard evidentialist focus on an agent's reflectively available "reasons" which lend the agent a certain kind of personal or subjective justification for her belief.

One main kind of etiological challenge to the well-foundedness of someone’s belief is the consideration that if you had a different education/upbringing, you would very likely accept different beliefs than you actually do. Although a person’s religious identity and attendant religious beliefs are usually the ones singled out as targets of such “contingency” or “epistemic location” arguments, it is clear that a person’s place and time has a conditioning effect in all domains of controversial views, and over all of what in the epistemology of disagreement are termed our nurtured beliefs. Still, given the absolutism that has often attended religious truth claims, together with the great contrariety of teachings based upon purported divine revelation, arguments from contingency have often been presented as having special force against religious ‘enthusiasts.’
Chapter Two argues that if we are to explicate the force of problems of religious luck, we need to think more carefully about the scope and force of skeptical arguments of this general type. Contingency problems are not often considered serious objections to faith, since there are narrative theological explanations about differences between “home” and “alien” religious traditions, which any adherent of a particular tradition might appeal to. But what I term the New Problem tries to present a qualified and re-focused set of concerns, rather than a sweeping sort of skepticism. First, I carefully delimit the scope of the de jure challenge which the contingency and insensitivity of belief suggests. In general terms, a de jure challenge implicates dereliction of epistemic duty, intellectual viciousness, or some other sense of epistemic unacceptability to some target class of religious belief, narrow or broad (Plantinga 1995). Next, I redirect that challenge through a new thought experiment aimed at clarifying how the mind-set of religious exclusivism is enabled only through counter-inductive or “pattern-breaking” thinking. Much more focused than any overbroad argument from contingency, the New Problem of religious luck is presented as a strong de jure challenge to the reasonableness of religious exclusivist a) conceptions of faith and b) responses to religious multiplicity.

In the spring of 2020 I delivered three seminars on hinge epistemology and religious belief for the University of Porto. The document here contains descriptions of the content of those seminars and suggested reading material. The three seminars were on (1) Wittgenstein, hinge epistemology and religious belief (2) Duncan Pritchard's Quasi-Fideism and (3) Gorazd Andrejc's take on the role of hinges in understanding religious belief.
In 2021 I also gave a seminar on hinge epistemology and religious belief for the same course.

The knowledge and attendant justification norms of belief and assertion serve to regulate our doxastic attitudes towards, and practices of asserting, various propositions.  I argue that conforming to these norms under conditions of religious ignorance promotes responsible acts of assertion, epistemic humility, and non-dogmatic doxastic attitudes towards the content of one’s own faith.  Such conformity also facilitates the formation of the religious personality in a healthy direction.  I explore these ideas in relation to the Christian faith tradition, but my reflections should generalize.

Page 15. BEYOND BELIEF AND UNBELIEF David M. Wulff ABSTRACT The word" belief and its derivatives, although still widely thought to characterize the essential religious attitude, have proved on closer examination to be surprisingly inapt. ...

This paper continues my development of philosophy of religion as multidisciplinary comparative research. An earlier paper, "Wittgenstein and Contemporary Belief-Credence Dualism" compared Wittgensteinian reflections on religious discourse and praxis with B-C dualism as articulated by its leading proponents. While some strong commonalities were elaborated that might help to bridge Continental and Analytic approaches in philosophy of religion, Wittgenstein was found to be a corrective to B-C dualism especially as regards the psychology and philosophy of risk/luck as they apply to doxastic faith ventures. This paper aims to further elaborate a basis for improved dialogue between philosophers, theologians, and scholars in special sciences which study religion. I call this basis the Triangulated model, or the ABC's of religious epistemics, in order to contrast it with the B-C dualist proposal.

I propose a conceptual framework for studying the epistemic path to explicit propositional faith, i.e. assent-based knowledge in response to divine Revelation. For that purpose I define the notions of revelatory epistemic state (the set of revealed propositions known by faith), revelatory epistemic position (the medium of divine Revelation acknowledged), and revelatory epistemological position (the criteria for determining whether a purported medium of divine Revelation is actually so). I further define, for any revelatory tradition, the antecedent epistemological position (ARELP) that is required to be able to arrive to explicit propositional faith according to that tradition and the consequent epistemological position (CRELP) that results from that faith. I state the ARELP which is required for Christianity (R4C-ARELP) and the Christian epistemic position, and then study a possible Jewish CRELP which is incompatible with the R4C-ARELP, showing that it is false in the framework of the Biblical Israelite faith. Finally I compare Biblical Israel's and the Church's divinely-mandated consequent epistemological positions, and give a principled reason why only the latter places the faithful in a state of epistemic insulation which excludes the possibility of a future public divine Revelation.