Religious Epistemology

This paper critically reviews the current status of the concept of distance in human geography in order to argue that recent experimentally-driven work in construal-level theory offers ample opportunities for recasting distance as a key geographical trope. After analysing the four entangled dimensions of distance revealed by construal-level theory (spatial distance; temporal distance; social distance; and hypothetical distance), the paper articulates this research program from experimental psychology with geographical work on non-representational theory, geographical imaginations/imaginative geographies, learning as a geographical process, TimeSpace theorizing, and ontogenetic understandings of space. It is argued that the subjective understanding of distance afforded by construal-level theory can rescue distance from its entrenched association with positivistic geography and spatial analysis. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.07.018

The paper provides a detailed theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between contingency and necessity, and applies it to major schools of thought in the social sciences.

Key words: social theory; cultural theory; political theory; legal theory; political economy;  historiography; social sciences; historical institutionalism; epistemology; gender studies;

How to cite:
Simandan, D. (2010) Beware of contingency. Environment and planning D: Society and Space, 28(3), pp. 388 - 396.

Some examples suggest that religious credences (or “beliefs”) respond to evidence. Other examples suggest they are wildly unresponsive. So the examples taken together suggest there is a puzzle about whether descriptive religious attitudes respond to evidence or not. I argue for a solution to this puzzle according to which religious credences are characteristically not responsive to evidence; that is, they do not tend to be extinguished by evidence contrary to them. And when they appear to be responsive, it is because the agents with those credences are playing what I call The Evidence Game, which in fundamental ways resembles the games of make-believe described by Kendall Walton’s (1990) theory of make-believe.

This dissertation presents an historical investigation of the reception of phenomenology in France from 1889-1939. It examines anticipations of phenomenology in French thought as well as early encounters of French academic philosophers and religious thinkers with the phenomenological philosophies of Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger.

In 2014, an edited version will appear as volume 208 in the Phaenomenologica series under the title: "Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters." Please refer to the link below for publication information.

We develop a new model of how human agency-detection capacities and other socio-cognitive biases are involved in forming religious beliefs. Crucially, we distinguish general religious beliefs (such as *God exists*) from personal religious beliefs that directly refer to the agent holding the belief or to her peripersonal time and space (such as *God appeared to _me_ last night*). On our model, people acquire general religious beliefs mostly from their surrounding culture; however, people use agency-intuitions and other low-level experiences to form personal religious beliefs. We call our model the Interactive Religious Experience Model (IREM). IREM inverts received versions of Hyperactive Agency-Detection Device Theory (HADD Theory): instead of saying that agency-intuitions are major causes of religious belief in general, IREM says that general belief in supernatural agents causes people to seek situations that trigger agency-intuitions and other experiences, since these enable one to form personal beliefs about those agents. In addition to developing this model, we (1) present empirical and conceptual difficulties with received versions of HADD Theory, (2) explain how IREM incorporates philosophical work on indexical belief, (3) relate IREM to existing anthropological and psychological research, and (4) propose future empirical research programs based on IREM.

The American founding principles contained in the Declaration of Independence are being replaced.  More specifically, many legal scholars, jurists, and politicians act legally and politically from different philosophical assumptions than that which is contained in this famous document.  It has been argued that to stray from the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence is to stray from that which makes America, America. This essay will show that America is in a transition from a government that was founded on the principles of Natural Law with a minimal commitment to deism to a government that is founded on a Rawlsian type social contract theory that is committed to secular reason.  Furthermore, this article will show that while the original American constitutional experiment was by and large congenial to religious reasoning, many contemporary theorists believe that religious restraint is demanded by a properly functioning liberal democracy.

I argue that psychology and epistemology should posit distinct cognitive attitudes of religious credence and factual belief, which have different etiologies and different cognitive and behavioral effects. I support this claim by presenting a range of empirical evidence that religious cognitive attitudes tend to lack properties characteristic of factual belief, just as attitudes like hypothesis, fictional imagining, and assumption for the sake of argument generally lack such properties. Furthermore, religious credences have distinctive properties of their own. To summarize: factual beliefs (i) are practical setting independent, (ii) cognitively govern other attitudes, and (iii) are evidentially vulnerable. By way of contrast, religious credences (a) have perceived normative orientation, (b) are susceptible to free elaboration, and (c) are vulnerable to special authority. This theory provides a framework for future research in the epistemology and psychology of religious credence.

Catterall's (2018) editorial note for issue 22.2 of CITY, like the final footnote in Barnesmoore's (2018a) editorial for the same issue, raises the question of 'what/whose order is to be asserted in the city'. This question leads us back to the age old question of authority in social, political, economic, religious, etc. systems—who or what has the authority to assert the order of things (in the city and beyond)? This question of authority, as noted by Springer (2014), is all too often understood in the banally hierarchical terms of the Artificial Worldview—which accepts the order of (human) nature as evil and views the production of social, political, economic, religious, etc. order as subsequently dependent upon hierarchical domination (Barnesmoore 2018b)—and the elite class, the state 1 , the legal system, the police, 'bigger scales' and other such edifices of the Artificial Worldview and its conception of order through hierarchical dominion are thus (oft unproblematically) accepted as the natural authority from which the order of things (in the city and beyond) is derived. I have been asked by a reviewer to " set up the critique of urban theory and develop it using examples " , and have done my best to fulfill this request, but, moving from Foucault's insightful and oft repeated observation that the power of what is said is often most clearly expressed in what is therefore not said, my critique of Urban and Geographical theory and the ontological-epistemological debates waged therein is rooted less in what has been said than in what has not been said. My critique is rooted in the lack of engagement with questions of worldview (of the nexus of cosmology and ontology) and the subsequent, unproblematic acceptance of the Colonial Modernist incarnation of the dominant, domineering Artificial Worldview (Four Arrows and Narvaez 2016; Barnesmoore 2018b) implied therein.

The chapter offers a comparison of an Orthodox and a Roman Catholic approach to the foundations of sacramental theology. With each theologian the author analyses an underlying epistemology, a type of relational and symbolic understanding of God, and then asks how these influence preference either for the church or for the world as a starting point for sacramental theology. In her conclusion she suggests how both approaches could complement each other.

In this article I offer a venturesome introduction to the possibility of an analytic epistemology of Israelite religion. The aim is to propose some descriptive concerns for the biblical scholar interested in what the Hebrew Bible assumed about the justification of religious knowledge and belief in the world of the text. Topics touched on are evidentialism, divine testimony, the problem of allotheism, the concept of divine revelation and the logic of belief revision. A 1 Mary Healy & Robin Parry, eds., The Bible and Epistemology: Biblical Soundings on the Knowledge of God (Colorado Springs: Paternoster Press, 2007), ix. The contribution of Ryan O'Dowd is notable for an attempt to be concerned with the Hebrew Bible and epistemology.

In the apocryphal text of the Letter (Epistle) of Jeremiah (Ep Jer), a long list of reasons is given by the implied author as to why certain entities alleged to be gods are not in fact such. Brief summaries of the author's various points characterise scholarly perspectives thereon. What has been overlooked in the research, however, and the topic of this article, concerns the converse fact that, in the construction of a negative identity for divinity, the text also assumes a lot about what a god must actually be like. Moreover, what is implicit in these " meta-theistic " presuppositions has never before been identified; hence the need for an attempted inferential reconstruction of what, according to the polemics of Ep Jer, makes a god divine.

Moving from Barnesmoore's (2016) theorization of humans as beings with the potential for conscious (epistemological) evolution, this article argues that a revolution in the ideas by which ('world view' in which) we conceive of potential practice must necessarily precede a revolution of academic and social practice (that theory necessarily precedes practice). Revolution must be rooted in revolutionary ideas and cannot be facilitated by practices that rise from (are rationalized within) the hegemonic essence (ideas, axioms and logics) of the regime against which revolution is being waged.

Agents require a constant flow, and a high level of processing, of relevant semantic information, in order to interact successfully among themselves and with the environment in which they are embedded. Standard theories of information, however, are silent on the nature of epistemic relevance. In this paper, a subjectivist interpretation of epistemic relevance is developed and defended. It is based on a counterfactual and metatheoretical analysis of the degree of relevance of some semantic information i to an informee/agent a, as a function of the accuracy of i understood as an answer to a query q, given the probability that q might be asked by a. This interpretation of epistemic relevance vindicates a strongly semantic theory of information, according to which semantic information encapsulates truth. It accounts satisfactorily for several important applications and interpretations of the concept of relevant information in a variety of philosophical areas. And it interfaces successfully with current philosophical interpretations of causal and logical relevance.

Religious diversity is a key topic in contemporary philosophy of religion. One way religious diversity has been of interest to philosophers is in the epistemological questions it gives rise to. In other words, religious diversity has been seen to pose a challenge for religious belief. In this study four approaches to dealing with this challenge are discussed. These approaches correspond to four well-known philosophers of religion, namely, Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, and John Hick. The study is concluded by suggesting four factors which shape one’s response to the challenge religious diversity poses to religious belief.

This collection of essays and notes attempts to tread the invisible borders between mythos, the neoliberal-Christian-nationalist 'world view' and socio-political trends in the rise of Trump, the Red Hats and the Evangelicals to political dominance in the United States.

“…Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.” (Foucault 1972, p. 17)

This editorial does not cede the ontological battle to the Colonial, Modernist Worldview in accepting the ‘commonsensical’ (from the perspective of the Colonial, Modernist Worldview…) assumption that the visible world of manifest facts—‘the real world out there’—is more real than the invisible, unmanifest world of ideas emotions, forms etc. (Needleman 1975; Nicoll 1989; Herman 2008; Blaser 2013) As such, this editorial explores the ideational continuities and discontinuities (Foucault 1972) of the articles assembled in this issue through an overtly nonlinear, nomadic perspective that is rooted in the Worldviews and associated conceptions of order that articulate the invisible lines of ideational continuity and discontinuity that run through the articles. Though a discrete, linear argument belies the nonlinear orientation of this editorial, there are a few arguments that emerge in the following pages: 1. freedom in the city is dependent upon ontological freedom, which is to say upon the right to assert the order of things in the city; 2. freedom in the academy is dependent upon ontological freedom, which might be best explicated by the assertion that freedom in the many and varied epistemological debates that are being waged within the academy cannot be attained without the freedom to assert the assumptions concerning the nature of reality upon which these epistemological debates are dependent; 3. perceived ‘freedom’ and ‘agency’ that come without the capacity and power to assert the order of things for ones self ought to be understood as the illusion of freedom and agency by which liberal democracy attempts to render hierarchical domination as sustainable rather than actual freedom and agency given that potentials for thought, feeling, behavior and conception of being are expanded and constrained by an individual’s commonsensical assumptions concerning the nature of reality. A true revolution of practice cannot occur without a revolution in the Worldview from which we conceptualize practice, be it in the city or in the academy. (Barnesmoore 2017) As for a more general orientation to contemporary social science, this editorial and its nonlinear lines of exploration seek to inspire increased (and less ephemeral…)  engagement with the burgeoning ontological turn (Horton 2015; Heywood 2017) in our discussions of cities in CITY.

Does a direct experience of God and the associated grace-filled transformation make people infallible, or can even saints still be wrong when they interpret who can be saved and who cannot, what forms of life people should choose, which political systems, figures and positions they should support? This article examines what St Gregory Palamas says on the nature of the saints' experience and knowledge, how stability and progress are interrelated in his notion of deification, and what the consequences are of his differentiation between knowledge coming from above and natural knowledge. Among the reasons for the appreciation of St Gregory Palamas in twentieth and twenty first century theology is undoubtedly his emphasis on the real presence of God in creation, and, in particular, in the human experience of being reached, purified, and transformed by God, who through his grace joins to himself whom he wishes. It could be argued that his essence-energy distinction, or his accounts of the psychosomatic techniques of prayer, all serve this one goal: to defend the reality of divine-human communion. Preserving divine simplicity, on the one hand, and the possibility of human deification, on the other, Palamas argued that the eschatological divine fullness of life can irrupt into this life, as in the case of Christ's Incarnation. Through Christ, it can transform people who are found worthy to see this fullness in terms of the uncreated deifying light. In this article, I will examine the epistemological consequences of the direct experiences of and participation in God. My basic question will be: according to Palamas, does the experience of the deifying light make holy men and women infallible in their theological statements, in their discernment of what are, and what are not, good morals or even good political decisions?

The Summa minorum or Summa Halensis, long attributed mistakenly to Alexander of Hales, the founder of the Franciscan intellectual tradition, was known in its own time as the first comprehensive and systematic effort to lay down distinctly Franciscan theological and philosophical perspectives.  The famous early Franciscan Bonaventure appears to have had much of it at his fingertips, though he may have contributed to later sections himself, and to have regarded it as a key resource in his own training in the burgeoning Franciscan intellectual tradition.
At least until recently, however, this important text has not received much attention from scholars.  One reason for this neglect may have to do with the difficulties involved in determining the precise author of various sections of the Summa.  While Alexander's own work may have been the basis for a good many of these, his chief collaborator and colleague, John of La Rochelle, is also believed to have acted as a major contributor, with others like William of Melitona and Odo Rigaldi playing roles as well. For reasons to do with the complex question of authorship and possibly others, consequently, scholars have tended to focus on the work of Bonaventure, who arguably incorporates the insights of his teachers into his own creative synthesis, and on later thinkers like John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, who developed Franciscan insights in new and even ‘modern’ directions.
In spite of its longstanding neglect, the Summa, and in this case, its introductory discussion of the knowledge of God, merits scholarly attention on my argument, precisely because it represents the first major effort to articulate a Franciscan intellectual vision, and in that sense lays the foundation for the further development of Franciscan thought, with all its later innovations. As one of the first articles in the Summa, preceded only by a preliminary discussion of the status of theology as a science, this article is particularly important for scholarly purposes in that it sets the agenda in many respects for the questions to be treated subsequently in the Summa.
Although the Summa’s account of the knowledge of God is developed almost exclusively in conversation with Augustine and secondarily, Scripture, with only scant references to other sources like John of Damascus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Ambrose of Milan, Boethius, and Richard of St Victor, I will argue in this paper that it is not a mere re-iteration of Augustine’s outlook, as scholars have often supposed. Rather, the article under consideration offers an innovative and uniquely Franciscan account of the knowledge of God.
With a view to bolstering this claim, I will start below by offering an account of the key arguments of the article, noting at the end of this discussion various points of connection with the vision and values of the early Franciscan order.  Next, I will analyse the Summist’s use of authorities, Augustine in particular, in this context, with the aim of illustrating how he enlists sources in the project of developing distinctly Franciscan ideas that transcend them. Finally, I will conclude with some observations about what this inquiry teaches us about the methods that should be employed in the study or interpretation of scholastic thought, particularly in its high period, the thirteenth century.

This essay reconstructs the sophisticated views on free will and determinism of the nineteenth-century Hindu mystic Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886) and brings them into dialogue with the views of three Western philosophers—namely, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Lord Kames (1696-1782) and the contemporary analytic philosophers Saul Smilansky and Derk Pereboom. Sri Ramakrishna affirms hard theological determinism, the view that God determines everything we do and think. At the same time, however, he claims that God, in His infinite wisdom, has endowed ordinary unenlightened people with the illusion of free will for the sake of their moral and spiritual welfare. Kames, I suggest, defends a theological determinist position remarkably similar to Sri Ramakrishna's. However, I argue that Sri Ramakrishna's mystical orientation puts him in a better position than Kames to explain why a loving God would implant in us the illusion of free will in the first place. I then show how certain aspects of the views of Smilansky and Pereboom resonate with those of Sri Ramakrishna.

Reformed epistemology, roughly, is the thesis that religious belief can be rational without argument. After providing some background, I present Plantinga's defense of reformed epistemology and its influence on religious debunking arguments. I then discuss three objections to Plantinga's arguments that arise from the following topics: skeptical theism, cognitive science of religion, and basicality. I then show how reformed epistemology has recently been undergirded by a number of epistemological theories, including phenomenal conservatism and virtue epistemology. I end by noting that a good objection to reformed epistemology must criticize either a substantive epistemological theory or the application of that theory to religious belief; I also show that the famous Great Pumpkin Objection is an example of the former. [Word Count: 118]

An increasing number of studies have seen the light over the last few decades concerning the epistemology of the book of Ecclesiastes. The extant research seems to be limited to try to find a suitable philosophical profile for Qohelet's concept of knowledge whilst ignoring a whole array of topics and theories in contemporary analytic epistemology. The available research thus reveals an 'inside-out' approach that is, reading Qohelet and then seeking to link his thought to a particular epistemological stance. In this study, however, an 'outside-in' approach is opted for that involves noting all the various issues in epistemology and then comparing each with what, if anything, Qohelet assumed in relation to the specific matter at hand.

It is widely acknowledged that the new emerging discipline cognitive science of religion has a bearing on how to think about the epistemic status of religious beliefs. Both defenders and opponents of the rationality of religious belief have used cognitive theories of religion to argue for their point. This paper will look at the defender-side of the debate. I will discuss an often used argument in favor of the trustworthiness of religious beliefs, stating that cognitive science of religion shows that religious beliefs are natural and natural beliefs ought to be trusted in the absence of counterevidence. This argument received its most influential defense from Justin Barrett in a number of papers, some in collaboration with Kelly James Clark. I will discuss their version of the argument and argue that it fails because the natural beliefs discovered by cognitive scientists of religion are not the religious beliefs of the major world religions. A survey of the evidence from cognitive science of religion will show that cognitive science does show that other beliefs come natural and that these can thus be deemed trustworthy in the absence of counterevidence. These beliefs are teleological beliefs, afterlife beliefs and animistic theistic beliefs.

RE: Facades, illusions & ideological concepts created & promoted by ancient royalty out of necessity; effective creation of an alternate version of reality. It is only by knowing this information that the true nature of ancient texts may be understood correctly. Not knowing, means making incorrect assumptions & conclusions. Important!

Recourse to auxiliary disciplines has greatly contributed to the ways in which biblical scholars seek to elucidate various dimensions of meaning in textual constructions of dreams and dreaming in the Old Testament. The original contribution this article hopes to make to the ongoing research on associated oneirocritic topoi is to propose the so-called philosophy of dreaming as a potential dialogue partner to supplement already available perspectives within the multidisciplinary discussion. At present, there is no descriptive philosophical approach exclusively devoted to the identification and clarification of the folk-philosophical assumptions implicit in oneirocritic materials as conditions of their possibility. By way of comparative-philosophical commentary, the article features a brief introduction to the related research within Old Testament studies, an overview of the history and problems of the auxiliary subject,
and an illustration of how the new approach might look when applied to texts involving ‘oneirophany’ (Gn 15:1–21, 20:3–6, 28:11–17 and 1 Ki 3:5–15). The study concludes with a few remarks on the limits of the proposal and suggestions for more extensive and in-depth future research in related and alternative areas.

All'interno di questo numero della rIvista antimoderna Antarès (qui caricata per intero) si accede al saggio su l'approccio cognitivo di Ioan P. Culianu (Iasi 1950-Chicago 1991) in ambito della storia delle religioni. Lo studioso romeno, assassinato nel 1991, è stato un precursore in questo senso, per questo ho voluto inquadrare il suo pensiero in un filone di ricerca emerso negli Stati Uniti proprio negli anni della sua morte con il nome di neuroteologia.  E' lo studio dei fenomeni religiosi implicanti uno stato alterato di coscienza dalla prospettiva neurologica.  Lo sviluppo di queste ricerche prende forma più compiuta a partire dal XXI° secolo con una sofisticata tecnologia SPECT per rilevare le attività cerebrali sottostanti l’esperienza mistico-religiosa. L’esperimento coinvolse monaci e monache in stato di profonda meditazione, per capire mediante hi-tech quali fossero le zone correlate all’esperienza spirituale.  Culianu è tuttavia partito da presupposti totalmente diversi rispetto ai sopra citati neuroscienziati americani, vediamo quali ...
http://www.bietti.it/riviste/lune-dacciaio-i-miti-della-fantascienza/culianu-e-lapproccio-cognitivo-nella-storia-delle-religioni/

The questions of whether God reveals himself; if so, how we can know a purported revelation is authentic; and how such revelations relate to the insights of reason are discussed by John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, G. W. Leibniz, and Immanuel Kant, to name a few. Yet, what these philosophers say with such consistency about revelation stands in stark contrast with the claims of the Christian East, which are equally consistent from the second century through the fourteenth century. In this essay, I will compare the modern discussion of special revelation from Thomas Hobbes through Johann Fichte with the Eastern Christian discussion from Irenaeus through Gregory Palamas. As we will see, there are noteworthy differences between the two trajectories, differences I will suggest merit careful consideration from philosophers of religion.

While numerous commentators have discussed Kant’s views on mysticism in general, very few scholars have examined Kant’s specific views on different types of mystical experience.  I suggest that Kant’s views on direct mystical experience (DME) differ substantially from his views on indirect mystical experience (IME).  In this paper, I focus on Kant’s complex views on IME in both his pre-critical and critical writings and lectures.  In Section 1, I examine Kant’s early work, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766), where he defends the possibility that the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg’s alleged visions of the spirit-world are veridical cases of IME.  In Section 2, I discuss Kant’s views on IME during his critical period.  In 2.1, I argue that the epistemology of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason accommodates the possibility of IME.  In 2.2, I examine Kant’s views on Swedenborgian visions in his lectures from the 1770s to the 1790s and argue that his critical views on Swedenborg are largely continuous with his pre-critical views in Dreams.  In 2.3, I examine passages in Kant’s late works, Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone (1793) and The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), where he discusses three non-Swedenborgian types of IME.  In Section 3, I explore briefly how Kant’s views on IME relate to contemporary debates among analytic philosophers of religion regarding the nature and possibility of mystical experience.

By focusing on Eliade’s early life and writings (1921–1936), and specifically on his work on Yoga, I address in this paper a question that is frequently asked about the problematic relation between personal belief and scholarship in fields such as the history of religions. Eliade’s interest in Yoga showcases his own personal spiritual quest, of course. But it is also informed by his earlier readings of, and reflections on, two polar aspects of the religious experience: the magical and the mystical. For Eliade, these two categories provide not only a key to unlocking the conceptual and pragmatic dimensions of Yoga, but also the impetus for charting a systematic theory of religion. The last major expression of these early ideas can be seen in Yoga: Essai sur les origines de la mystique indienne (1936). Eliade’s thoughts on Yoga and religion then took different paths, reaching their full expression in works published in Paris after 1945. In his later books on Yoga – Techniques du Yoga (1948), Le Yoga: Immortalité et liberté (1954) – the twofold schema of the magical and the mystical no longer plays a key hermeneutical role. Nonetheless, understanding this early phase of his work is crucial if we are to provide a comprehensive account of the development of his thought on Yoga. This early phase in his scholarly career and experiential transformation, marked by his trip to India, is also very important in terms of understanding the further developments of his ideas on history of religions, as well as to evince the ground on which Eliade built his own – never confessed – private religious belief.

escribió un precioso poema que tituló "Cantar del alma que se huelga de conoscer a Dios por la fe". En este cántico se exalta a Dios como la fuente eterna escondida, hermosa y llena de vida y se canta el gozo de la persona que alcanza a conocer a Dios por la fe. Sobre ese conocimiento quiero reflexionar en este escrito. Creo que a todos parecerá un tema de la máxima importancia -que ha sido afrontado y pensado ampliamente en la tradición teológica-y creo también que de gran actualidad. El modo en que pensemos la relación entre la fe y el conocimiento resulta determinante para la comprensión de la fe y sobre todo, para su integración en la persona humana. Por otra parte, resulta también claro, que el aspecto epistemológico, del que me ocuparé, es sólo uno de los elementos de que debemos considerar para comprender una realidad tan rica como la fe 1 .

Croire que Jésus est ressuscité n'est pas chose facile. Même dans le cas où cela a bel et bien eu lieu, il n'est pas facile pour tous d'y croire, d'y croire vraiment. Pourquoi ? C'est ce que ce texte se propose d'élucider. Pour ce faire, nous avons convoqué trois approches en philosophie de la connaissance : l'évidentialisme, le présuppositionalisme, et l'épistémologie des vertus de R. Pouivet.

Voici la version révisée d'avril 2019.

In this paper, I explore the possibility of reading Wittgenstein’s understanding of religious belief with Tillich’s concept of existential/religious doubt, especially as developed in his Dynamics of Faith. I will argue, first, that Wittgenstein’s understanding of religious belief as a deep certainty of a grammatical remark is not the same as his understanding of hinge-certainty of “hinge propositions”, and that the relevant difference is that Wittgenstein leaves room for the possibility of doubt in the former but not in the latter. I then argue that Tillich’s concept of dynamic faith by which Tillich explicates the role of doubt internal to religious believing can significantly enrich the Wittgensteinian conception of religious belief. Despite the notable differences between Wittgenstein’s thoughts and Tillich’s overall system of theology, Tillich’s treatment of the concept of “faith” signals a possibility of a more positive way of relating Wittgenstein’s grammatical investigation and Tillich’s mature understanding of philosophical theology. At the end of the essay, responding to D.Z. Phillips’ negative assessment of Tillich’s theology in the name of Wittgenstein, I will suggest what that more positive way of relating the two might look like.

In this thesis I explore the pressing and perennial ontological question of the existence of God. In so doing, I set out to develop a (somewhat) novel deductively valid argument against the existence of God, more particularly, the type of God that is thought to constitute the common metaphysical and theological capital of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The argument, known as the Argument from Doxastic Discord, is an affirmative argument for Atheism and seeks to demonstrate that there is an explicit logical contradiction between (i) the observable empirical fact of doxastic heterogeneity amongst finite persons on the one hand, and (ii) the classic ‘great-making’ properties usually ascribed to God on the other.

It will be argued that the empirical existence of doxastic heterogeneity (of a particular kind) cannot be logically reconciled with a perfect supernatural being that is supposed to simultaneously co-instantiate the properties of omnipotence, omniscience and omni-benevolence and who desires to have a deep, long lasting and meaningful relationship with all human persons.

I intend to divide the discussion into three broad sections. In the first section, I articulate the general landscape in which this discussion is taking place by first clearly explicating the core concerns that lie behind, and motivate, the Argument from Doxastic Discord. In so doing, it will be necessary to disambiguate two concerns viz. the epistemic and metaphysical concerns. Of the two concerns, it will be the latter that will form the principal subject matter of this thesis.

It will also be necessary to explicate and distinguish the crucial concepts of ‘God’, ‘Theism’, ‘Atheism’, ‘Ultimism’ and ‘Belief’ as well as outline the inter-relationships between these concepts. Part of this exercise will involve distinguishing personal and impersonal conceptions of God as well as articulating what we really mean when we speak of the so called ‘great making’ properties of omnipotence, omniscience and omni-benevolence i.e. the properties of realist cataphatic ‘perfect being’ theology.

In the second section I set out the positive argument - the Argument from Doxastic Discord. The argument itself is divided into two parts. The first part of the argument contains just two premises - one theological and the other empirical – as well as the main conclusion. The second part of the argument is an extended sub-argument justifying the theological premise. In this section I, therefore, explain and unpack the content of both the theological premise and the empirical premise, as well as present the prima facie case for the crucial premises constituting the sub-argument.

Finally, in the third section I set out the principal objections that might be made by a theist to both the theological and empirical premises of the first part of the argument. In particular, the focus shall be on articulating the most promising theistic response to the crucial premises in the sub-argument and why, in the final analysis such responses are, to my mind, unpersuasive.

In conclusion, I hope to persuade the reflective reader that the Argument from Doxastic Discord is a worthwhile affirmative argument for Atheism that can, and should, take its place in the atheistic armamentarium, alongside other prominent cognate atheological arguments such as the Argument from Evil and the Argument from Divine Hiddenness.

The chapter argues that the search for a single construal of the realism/anti-realism distinction is misguided. There are more or less apt versions of the distinction, each framed with a specific set of interests. The terms of art, ‘realist’ and ‘anti-realist’, are not helpfully construed as applying across whole domains (‘science’, ‘religion’, ‘ethics’), or thinkers, but at the level of particular statements. As such, the distinction has less in common with categorizations such as ‘theist/atheist’, or ‘empiricist/rationalist’, and more in common with (contestable, but still useful for many) terms of art such as ‘a priori/a posteriori’ and ‘analytic/synthetic’. The chapter explores four alternative construals of the distinction: cognitivist, ontological, epistemological, and semantic. When we get to the more subtle construals of semantic anti-realism/realism, it is unclear what precisely (if anything) is at stake in the debate.