Are there de jure objections to Mādhvic belief (original) (raw)

A proper de jure objection to the epistemic rationality of religious belief

Religious Studies, 2010

Abstract: I answer Alvin Plantinga's challenge to provide a 'proper'de jure objection to religious belief. What I call the 'sophisticates' evidential objection'(SEO) concludes that sophisticated Christians lack epistemic justification for believing central Christian propositions. The SEO utilizes a theory of epistemic justification in the spirit of the evidentialism of Richard Feldman and Earl Conee. I defend philosophical interest in the SEO (and its underlying evidentialism) against objections from Reformed epistemology, ...

Religious Epistemology

Philosophy Compass, 2015

Religious epistemology is the study of how subjects' religious beliefs might have, or fail to have, some form of positive epistemic status (such as knowledge, justification, warrant, rationality, etc.). The current debate is focused upon the kind of basis upon which a religious believer might rationally hold certain beliefs about God (whether God exists, what attributes God has, what God is doing, etc.). Engaging this issue are three groups of people who call themselves "fideists," "reformed epistemologists," and "evidentialists." Each group has a position, but the positions are not mutually exclusive in every case, and in the debate, the names better describe the groups' emphases rather than mutually exclusive positions in the debate. In this article, we will first give a brief historical survey of evidentialism, fideism, and reformed epistemology. Second, we will give the fideist's position. Third, we will give the evidentialist's position. Fourth, we will give the reformed epistemologist's position, and last, we will include some comments on the current state of the debate, where we will show that the groups' positions are not mutually exclusive.

Epistemology of Religious Belief

There has been a resurgence of interest in the epistemology of religion in the last twenty-five years, prompted for the most part by the rise of reformed epistemology which has energised the debate and brought this topic into mainstream epistemology. Alongside standard topics in the epistemology of religion, such as concerning the effectiveness of putative demonstrations of God's existence, there are also some new topics coming to the fore in the contemporary debate, such as the issue of how the epistemology of disagreement relates to specifically religious disagreements.

SCEPTICISM, FIDEISM AND RELIGIOUS EPISTEMOLOGY

Cambridge Handbook of Religious Epistemology

We will be examining the relationship between sceptical themes and debates concerning the rationality of religious belief. As we will see, this relationship manifests itself not only in terms of critiques of the rationality of religious belief, but also in prominent defenses of the rationality of religious belief, such as Lockean evidentialism, reformed epistemology, and sceptical fideism. Particular focus will be put on a specific form of sceptical fideism that employs an epistemic parity argument with regard to the epistemological status of religious and everyday belief. In this regard, we will be considering quasi-fideism, an account of the rationality of religious belief that applies a Wittgensteinian hinge epistemology to the religious case, and which has a natural affinity with sceptical fideism.

Religious Epistemological Disjunctivism (International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 2016)

This paper explores religious belief in connection with epistemological disjunctivism. It applies recent advances in epistemological disjunctivism to the religious case for displaying an attractive model of specifically Christian religious belief. What results is a heretofore unoccupied position in religious epistemology—a view I call 'religious epistemological disjunctivism' (RED). My general argument is that RED furnishes superior explanations for the sort of 'grasp of the truth' which should undergird 'matured Christian conviction' of religious propositions. To this end I first display the more familiar perceptual epistemological disjunctivism (PED), contrasting it with both externalist and classically internalist views. This prepares the way for introducing RED with its own distinctive factive mental state operator—pneuming that p. In this second section I present the RED model, not failing to address a potential problem concerning religious disagreement. I also clarify RED's distinctive internalist aspect, describing how it comports with contemporary internalist thinking in epistemology. I then move in section three to criticize externalist and classical internalist views, showing where they fail to make proper sense of the sort of knowing which should ground mature Christian conviction. Specifically, I highlight three intuitions which I think any theory of religious belief should capture: what I call the case-closed intuition, the good believer intuition, and the Plantingian platitude. This is all to set up for the final section where I argue that RED is superior for understanding proper religious believing— capturing the aforementioned intuitions.

Broadening Horizons: Constructing an Epistemology of Religious Belief

Louvain Studies, 2005

This essay explores both the context and constructive possibilities of Newman's emphasis on concrete, holistic reasoning in the Grammar of Assent, paying special attention to the influence of patristic thought on his own engagement with reductionistic accounts of rationality (e.g., evidentialism). An epistemology of religious belief thus construed focuses on the actual conditions of belief-formation and opens up new possibilities for connecting multiple dimensions of intellectual and spiritual life. In this sense, broadening epistemic horizons relocates epistemology from a thinly conceived self of paper logic to a thickly populated self in the concrete moments of human existence.

Tweedt 2022 Reviewof Debating Christian Religious Epistemology

Faith & Philosophy

In Debating Christian Religious Epistemology contains chapter length expositions from proponents of five different views of religious epistemology, which is the study of whether and how subjects’ religious beliefs can have a positive epistemic status (such as knowledge, justification, warrant, or rationality). The five views proposed are 1) Phenomenal Conservativism, 2) Classical Evidentialism, 3) Proper Functionalism, 4) Covenental Epistemology, and 5) Tradition-Based Perspectivalism. In this review, I summarize and analyze each view and their relationship to one another.

FAITH AND THE CLAIMS OF REASON

This article attempts to present a typology for evaluating religious truth claims in light of epistemological and metaphysical categories. Beginning with a distinction between "strong" and "weak" epistemological and metaphysical categories, it argues that a strong metaphysical set of beliefs need not be rooted in strong epistemological claims in order to be valid. Rather, it is possible to ground a "strong" set of metaphysical assertions within a "weak" epistemological framework, which, within its own framework, may be viewed to be presumptively true. Such a position, the article concludes, has the potential to provide a valid grounding for religious beliefs while allowing room for discourse across belief systems in a pluralistic society.

Faith and Epistemology: Religious Truth Claims and Epistemic Warrant

Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry, 2020

PREVIEW ONLY - READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE: https://doi.org/10.33929/sherm.2020.vol2.no1.09 This essay argues for the rationality of truth claims arising from religious faith over against the contention that such claims are, at best, viewed as subjective "value" language or, at worst, strictly irrational. An argument will be offered for the epistemic warrant of faith-based claims, not for the objective veracity of the religious claims themselves.