scholarly journals Transformative Experience and the Problem of Religious Disagreement

2021 ◽  
pp. 127-141
Author(s):  
Joshua Blanchard ◽  
L.A. Paul
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Epistemic Status ◽  
Transformative Experience ◽  
Peer Disagreement ◽  
Epistemological Problem ◽  
Religious Disagreement ◽  
The Relationship

Chapter 6 considers how peer disagreement over religion presents an epistemological problem: How can confidence in any religious claims including their negations be epistemically justified? Here, it is shown that the transformative nature of religious experience poses a further problem: to transition between religious belief and skepticism is not just to adopt a different set of beliefs, but to transform into a different version of oneself. It is argued that this intensifies the problem of pluralism by adding a new dimension to religious disagreement, for we can lack epistemic and affective access to our potential religious, agnostic, or skeptical selves. Yet, access to these selves seems to be required for the purposes of decision-making that is to be both rational and authentic. Finally, the chapter reflects on the relationship between the transformative problem and what it shows about the epistemic status of religious conversion and deconversion, in which one disagrees with one’s own transformed self.

scholarly journals First Person and Third Person Reasons in Religious Epistemology

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Zagzebski
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
The Other ◽  
First Person ◽  
Epistemic Reasons ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Religious Epistemology ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Religious Disagreement

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.

Religious Disagreement, Religious Experience, and the Evil God Hypothesis

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirk Lougheed
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Religious Believer ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
Peer Disagreement ◽  
Epistemic Peer ◽  
Religious Disagreement

Conciliationism is the view that says when an agent who believes P becomes aware of an epistemic peer who believes not-P, that she encounters a (partial) defeater for her belief that P. Strong versions of conciliationism pose a sceptical threat to many, if not most, religious beliefs since religion is rife with peer disagreement. Elsewhere (Removed) I argue that one way for a religious believer to avoid sceptical challenges posed by strong conciliationism is by appealing to the evidential import of religious experience. Not only can religious experience be used to establish a relevant evidential asymmetry between disagreeing parties, but reliable reports of such experiences also start to put pressure on the religious sceptic to conciliate toward her religious opponent. Recently, however, Asha Lancaster-Thomas poses a highly innovative challenge to the evidential import of religious experience. Namely, she argues that an evil God is just as likely to explain negative religious experiences as a good God is able to explain positive religious experiences. In light of this, religious believers need to explain why a good God exists instead of an evil God. I respond to Lancaster-Thomas by suggesting that, at least within the context of religious experience, (i) that the evil God hypothesis is only a challenge to certain versions of theism; and (ii) that the existence of an evil God and good God are compossible.

The Varieties of Religious Experience

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
William James
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Asking Questions ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Urgent Necessity

‘By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.’ The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) is William James’s classic survey of religious belief in its most personal, and often its most heterodox, aspects. Asking questions such as how we define evil to ourselves, the difference between a healthy and a divided mind, the value of saintly behaviour, and what animates and characterizes the mental landscape of sudden conversion, James’s masterpiece stands at a unique moment in the relationship between belief and culture. Faith in institutional religion and dogmatic theology was fading away, and the search for an authentic religion rooted in personality and subjectivity was a project conducted as an urgent necessity. With psychological insight, philosophical rigour, and a determination not to jump to the conclusion that in tracing religion’s mental causes we necessarily diminish its truth or value, in the Varieties James wrote a truly foundational text for modern belief. Matthew Bradley’s wide-ranging new edition examines the ideas that continue to fuel modern debates on atheism and faith.

Fine-tuning the Relationship between Religion and Intellectual Humility

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Everett L. Worthington
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
The Self ◽  
Content Area ◽  
Fine Tuning ◽  
Epistemic Status ◽  
Intellectual Humility ◽  
The Core ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Meaning System ◽  
The Relationship

I examine religious humility, which is one content area of intellectual humility. Intellectual humility is the subtype of humility that involves taking a humble stance in sharing ideas, especially when one is challenged or when an idea is threatening. I position religious humility within the context of general humility, spiritual humility, and relational humility, and thus arrive at several propositions. People who are intensely spiritually humble can hold dogmatic beliefs and believe themselves to be religiously humble, yet be perceived by others of different persuasions as religiously dogmatic and even arrogant. For such people to be truly religiously humble, they must feel that the religious belief is core to their meaning system. This requires discernment of which of the person’s beliefs are truly at the core. But also the religiously humble person must fulfill the definition of general humility, accurately perceiving the strengths and limitations of the self, being teachable to correct weaknesses, presenting oneself modestly, and being positively other-oriented. Humility thus involves (1) beliefs, values, and attitudes and (2) an interpersonal presentational style. Therefore, intellectually humble people must track the positive epistemic status of their beliefs and also must present with convicted civility.

Affective Rationalism and Religious Insight

2019 ◽  
pp. 182-228
Author(s):  
John Pittard
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Minor Role ◽  
Religious Disagreement ◽  
A Minor

This chapter considers further what implications rationalist weak conciliationism has for religious belief. Rationalist weak conciliationism may seem to imply that justified religious belief is a philosophical accomplishment reserved only for the analytically sophisticated and that personal religious experience plays at best a minor role in accounting for the rationality of religious belief. Resisting these alleged implications, the chapter argues against an “austere rationalism” that sees all rational insight as a product of dispassionate analytical faculties. A case is made for an “affective rationalism” that emphasizes the essential role played by the emotions in facilitating insights into evaluative questions, including evaluative questions that bear significantly on the plausibility of competing religious and irreligious outlooks. The chapter concludes with a discussion of examples that illustrate more concretely how rationalist weak conciliationism applies to situations of religious disagreement.

Science, Religion and a Culture of Life

2003 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-78
Author(s):  
Stephen C. Dilley ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Sensus Divinitatis ◽  
The Relationship

For those who wish to affirm a culture that values human life, the relationship between science and religion continues to be of import. Some, like Edward O. Wilson, think that naturalistic science will eventually account for all phenomena, even religious experience itself. This essay considers Wilson's hypothesis by surveying three classic explanations of universal religious belief: Sigmund Freud's projection theory, Charles Darwin's evolutionarry paradigm, and John Calvin's sensus divinitatis. Both Freud's and Darwin's views suffer from self-referential and evidential problems. In contrast, Calvin's model handles well major objections of religious pluralism and atheism. Of these three, Calvin's view is superior. Religion may not be reducible to a naturalistic explanation, and those who wish to promote a culture of life ought to view the relations between science and religion in a non-Wilsonian fashion, eschewing reductionism.

Introduction: Modernism and the Turn to Religion

Renascence ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-11
Author(s):  
Craig Woelfel ◽  
Jayme Stayer ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
The Other ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Religious Dimensions

This Introduction contextualizes the volume in modernist tensions between belief and unbelief, and subsequent debates about the nature of secularization. An opening moment considers Pound and Woolf’s rejection of T. S. Eliot’s religious conversion as emblematic of a “subtraction” theory of secularization, in which secularity and religious belief are taken as mutually exclusive horizons of understanding. Such thinking, it is argued, has precluded a more nuanced approach. Criticism has largely ignored more complex and fragmentary religious dimensions of modernist production; or, on the other hand, taken up religion only in the narrow and anachronistic sense of traditional Christianity. This volume attempts to explore the religious dimensions of modernism in a more modernist sense: taking modernist art as a critical liminal space for exploring new modes of religious experience in complex and resonant ways -- often in open rejection of traditional modes of faith, and in authors beyond the usual suspects.

scholarly journals Death anxiety, exposure to death, mortuary preferences, and religiosity in five countries

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Jong ◽  
Jamin Halberstadt ◽  
Christopher Michael Kavanagh ◽  
Matthias Bluemke
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Death Anxiety ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Demographic Information ◽  
The Relationship

We present three datasets from a project about the relationship between death anxiety and religiosity. These include data from 1,838 individuals in the United States (n = 813), Brazil (n = 800), Russia (n = 800), the Philippines (n = 200), South Korea (n = 200), and Japan (n = 219). Measures were largely consistent across samples: they include measures of death anxiety, experience and exposure to death, religious belief, religious behaviour, religious experience, and demographic information. Responses have also been back-translated into English where necessary, though original untranslated data are also included.

Probabilistic Knowledge

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Moss
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Racial Profiling ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Epistemic Status ◽  
Transformative Experience ◽  
Peer Disagreement ◽  
Probabilistic Knowledge ◽  
Female Speech ◽  
Legal Proof ◽  
Philosophical Debates

Traditional philosophical discussions of knowledge have focused on the epistemic status of full beliefs. This book argues that in addition to full beliefs, credences can constitute knowledge. For instance, your .4 credence that it is raining outside can constitute knowledge, in just the same way that your full beliefs can. In addition, you can know that it might be raining, and that if it is raining then it is probably cloudy, where this knowledge is not knowledge of propositions, but of probabilistic contents. The notion of probabilistic content introduced in this book plays a central role not only in epistemology, but in the philosophy of mind and language as well. Just as tradition holds that you believe and assert propositions, you can believe and assert probabilistic contents. Accepting that we can believe, assert, and know probabilistic contents has significant consequences for many philosophical debates, including debates about the relationship between full belief and credence, the semantics of epistemic modals and conditionals, the contents of perceptual experience, peer disagreement, pragmatic encroachment, perceptual dogmatism, and transformative experience. In addition, accepting probabilistic knowledge can help us discredit negative evaluations of female speech, explain why merely statistical evidence is insufficient for legal proof, and identify epistemic norms violated by acts of racial profiling. Hence the central theses of this book not only help us better understand the nature of our own mental states, but also help us better understand the nature of our responsibilities to each other.

Religious Disagreement and Epistemic Intuitions

2017 ◽  
Vol 81 ◽  
pp. 19-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Bergmann
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Peer Disagreement ◽  
Radical Skepticism ◽  
The Third ◽  
Religious Disagreement ◽  
The Way

AbstractReligious disagreement is, quite understandably, viewed as a problem for religious belief. In this paper, I consider why religious disagreement is a problem—why it is a potential defeater for religious belief—and I propose a way of dealing with this sort of potential defeater. I begin by focusing elsewhere—on arguments for radical skepticism. In section 1, I consider skeptical arguments proposed as potential defeaters for all of our perceptual and memory beliefs and explain what I think the rational response is to such potential defeaters, emphasizing the way epistemic intuitions are involved in both the skeptical arguments and my recommended response. In section 2, I discuss the way in which peer disagreement—on any topic—is a potential defeater for our beliefs, highlighting the conditions under which recognized disagreement is a successful defeater and those under which it isn't. In the third section, I consider how to use a section-1 type of response to deal with a section-2 type of defeater for religious belief.

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