Affective Rationalism and Religious Insight

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.

Introduction

This introduction begins by providing an initial sketch of the argument for disagreement-motivated religious skepticism that will be assessed in this book. According to this argument, facts about religious disagreement give you good reason to think that any beliefs you may have on controversial religious questions are the product of processes that do not reliably lead to true belief. And if you have good reason to think that some belief of yours is the product of such unreliable processes, then it is not reasonable for you to confidently persist in that belief. After sketching this skeptical position, a preview is given of the argument that unfolds over the following chapters. The introduction then concludes with reading plans for readers with different interests.

Conclusion

This brief conclusion notes that perhaps unlike strong conciliationism, the rationalist weak conciliationism that is defended in the book does not by itself provide a way of criticizing all undesirable forms of religious extremism. And a widespread attempt to follow rationalist weak conciliationism would arguably do less to improve humankind’s overall accuracy on religious matters than a widespread attempt to follow strong conciliationism. It is maintained that these considerations are not reasons to think that rationalist weak conciliationism is incorrect. Moreover, strong conciliationism may prove corrosive to both epistemic and practical rationality in the religious domain.

Partisan Justification and Religious Belief

Weak conciliationism affirms that many of one’s epistemic starting points enjoy “partisan justification,” justified confidence that exceeds the degree of confidence that is supportable on impartial grounds. But weak conciliationism does not itself supply an account that says when such partisan justification is and is not available. This chapter begins by identifying the options for an account of partisan justification. It then argues for an exclusively rationalist account according to which partisan justification is grounded in rational insight and is not available in disagreements with acknowledged internal rational parity. This argument presents a challenge for “reformed epistemologists,” like Alston and Plantinga, who deemphasize the role of rational insight in religious belief and who defend religious belief by emphasizing similarities between religious belief formation and the formation of perceptual beliefs. It is argued that the religious epistemologies of Alston and Plantinga cannot successfully meet the higher-order challenge posed by religious disagreement.

Elusive Impartiality

This chapter considers what implications a commitment to rigorous epistemic impartiality has for one’s religious beliefs and credences. It is argued that epistemic impartiality in the religious domain proves to be elusive for two reasons. First, a commitment to epistemic impartiality appears to be self-undermining, and arguably the best response to this self-undermining problem is incompatible with an unqualified commitment to epistemic impartiality in the religious domain. Second, the most plausible methods for identifying an impartial doxastic stance on religious matters require that one settle various questions that are themselves implicated in religious controversy. In particular, one must take a stand on questions concerning rational bias on religious matters, and these questions cannot be settled in a religiously impartial way. In light of this problem, it is far from obvious that religious skepticism is the attitude that best comports with a commitment to epistemic impartiality.

From Impartiality to Instrumentalism

This chapter defends an approach to disagreement that rejects the strong epistemic impartiality requirement endorsed by “strong conciliationists.” The central tenet of the “weak conciliationism” that is defended here is a requirement called “instrumentalism.” Instrumentalism supplies a basis for demanding conciliatory requirements in disagreements that are rationally superficial but does not support similarly demanding requirements in fundamental disagreements that are the result of divergent epistemic starting points. It is argued that the radical impartiality requirement of strong conciliationism, which does issue demanding conciliatory prescriptions in fundamental disputes, is unmotivated in light of the explanatory power of instrumentalism. The penultimate section addresses two objections to weak conciliationism. The first objection, adapted from Schoenfield, claims that following weak conciliationism has a lower expected “accuracy” than following strong conciliationism. The second objection holds that the instrumentalist framework, when pushed far enough, supports a strong epistemic impartiality requirement.

Unpalatable Conclusions and Deliberative Vertigo

Some claim that maintaining robust commitment to one’s favored religious outlook is likely to be compatible with following strong conciliationism even if strong conciliationism rules out having controversial religious beliefs. This is because there are nondoxastic forms of religious commitment that do not require confident belief in the religious outlook to which one is committed. This chapter challenges such optimism about the compatibility of religious skepticism and religious commitment. It is argued, first, that those who adopt impartial credences and follow a cost-benefit approach to religious decision-making are likely to find that their approach to decision-making requires adopting a highly unpalatable form of religious commitment. A second argument concludes that no religious commitment is rational if strong conciliationism is correct. According to this argument, the normative uncertainty required by epistemic impartiality brings about a “deliberative vertigo” that prevents rationally motivated engagement any religious or irreligious way of life.

Demotivating Reasons Impartiality

This chapter critiques two arguments for a reasons impartiality constraint. Christensen’s “restaurant argument” presents a case of disagreement where it is intuitively clear that the disputants cannot legitimately rely on their contested reasoning and that they should give equal weight to their competing views. Christensen argues that to explain these verdicts, one must appeal to a demanding epistemic impartiality requirement he calls “independence.” Against this, it is argued that the intuitive verdicts in the example can be explained by weaker principles, including an internal reason constraint and an agent impartiality constraint. Schellenberg’s “doxastic minimalism argument” holds that genuine investigators will extend default trust to all and only those doxastic practices that are universal and humanly unavoidable. It is argued that Schellenberg relies on an overly restrictive conception of the aims of inquiry, and that even given this conception, his criteria of universality and unavoidability lack a principled basis.

Disagreement-Motivated Religious Skepticism and the Commitment to Impartiality

This chapter begins by clarifying the focus of the book, which is what may be called the “higher-order argument for disagreement-motivated religious skepticism.” A key premise of this argument is that a suitably informed religious believer lacks justification for thinking that his or her process of religious belief formation is significantly more reliable than the collective reliability of the processes that otherwise epistemically qualified people use to form religious beliefs. Arguments for this premise that appeal to the rational symmetry of competing processes of religious belief formation are shown to be inadequate. It is argued that a viable argument for the key premise must posit three constraints on the factors that may justifiably ground epistemic self-trust in the face of religious disagreement: an “internal reason constraint,” an “agent impartiality constraint,” and a “reasons impartiality constraint.”