## 1. Simplifications




Epistemology is confusing because there are several sorts of items to
be evaluated and several sorts of evaluation. Since the topic of this
article is the epistemology of religion not general epistemology it
will be assumed that what is being evaluated is something related to
faith, namely individual religious beliefs, and that the way of
evaluating religious beliefs is as justified or unjustified.


This entry, therefore, concentrates on questions such as, "Is
it justified for Fatima to believe in God?", "Is it
justified for Richard to believe in the Trinity?", or "Is
it justified for Ramanujan to believe that Krishna is a human
incarnation of the divine?" It ignores such questions as whether
these beliefs count as knowledge or whether these beliefs are
scientific. It also ignores disputes between coherence theorists and
foundationalists and disputes over whether belief is
voluntary. Although these have some implications for the epistemology
of religion they are primarily topics in general epistemology.


Although the topic is religious belief the same questions can be
asked about faith in the absence of belief, where the standards might
be more lax. For example John Schellenberg (2009) has argued that it is
not justified to believe in a personal God, not justified to have
faith in a personal God , not justified even to believe in something
ultimate but it is justified to have a religious attitude of faith in
something ultimate. Finally, and more controversially, this entry
concentrates on Western epistemology of religion, which is not,
however, the same as the epistemology of Western religion. Note,
though, that epistemological disputes between Hindu and Buddhist
philosophers over a thousand years ago are much the same as those here
considered.


## 2. The Rejection of Enlightenment Evidentialism




Most contemporary epistemology of religion may be called *post
modern* in the sense of being a reaction to the Enlightenment, in
particular to the thesis of the *hegemony* of
evidentialism. (Compare Vanhoozer 2003.) Hegemony is discussed below,
but first consider evidentialism. This is the initially plausible
position that a belief is justified only if "it is proportioned
to the evidence". (Beliefs proportioned to the evidence include,
as a special case, the evidence itself.) Here several sorts of
evidence are allowed. One consists of beliefs in that which is
"evident to the senses", that is, beliefs directly due to
sense-experience. Another sort of evidence is that which is
"self-evident", that is, obvious once you think about
it. Evidence may also include the beliefs directly due to memory and
introspection. Again moral convictions might count as evidence, even
if not treated as "self-evident". But in order to state
the sort of evidentialism characteristic of Enlightenment thought, it
is stipulated that no beliefs asserting the content of religious or
mystical experiences count as evidence. For example, if Fatima had an
experience that she would describe as of the presence of God she
should not treat God's presence to her as a piece of evidence. That
does not prevent the claim that someone has had a religious experience
with a certain content from counting as evidence. For example, the
fact that Fatima had an experience as if of God's presence would be a
piece of evidence. Likewise the fact that various people report
miracles counts as evidence.




Evidentialism implies that no full religious belief (i.e., a religious
belief held with full confidence) is justified unless there is
conclusive evidence for it, or it is self-evident. The content of
religious experience has been stipulated not to count as
evidence. Even if, as Descartes held, the existence of God is
self-evident, beliefs such as Richard's in the Trinity and
Ramanujan's in the divinity of Krishna are not. So the only
available evidence for these beliefs would seem to be non-religious
premises, from which the religious beliefs are inferred. Therefore,
the only way of deciding whether the religious beliefs are justified
would be to examine various arguments with the non-religious beliefs
as premises and the religious beliefs as conclusions.




According to evidentialism it follows that if the arguments for there
being a God, including any arguments from religious experience, are at
best probable ones, and if, as most hold, God's existence is not
self-evident then no one would be justified in having full belief that
there is a God. And the same holds for other religious
beliefs. Likewise, it would not be justified to believe even partially
(i.e., with less than full confidence) if there is not a balance of
evidence for belief.




In fact it seems that many religious believers combine full belief
with "doubts" in the sense of some reasons for doubting,
or they combine partial belief with what they take to be weighty
reasons for disbelief. According to evidentialism this is not
justified. Other believers consider that, on reflection, they have
little reason for doubting but that they have almost no positive
evidence for their religious beliefs. According to evidentialism this
too is unjustified. This raises the question, how can we adjudicate
between an epistemological thesis which might otherwise be believed
and a religious belief which that thesis implies is unjustified? The
Enlightenment assumed two related, hegemony theses, those of
epistemology and of evidentialism. The hegemony of epistemology states
that (a) human beings can discover the correct epistemology in
isolation from discovering actual human tendencies to form beliefs,
and so (b) there is an overriding reason to use the correct
epistemology (once discovered) to correct the above-mentioned
tendencies. The hegemony of evidentialism adds to the hegemony of
epistemology the further thesis that (c) evidentialism is the correct
epistemology. If, according to evidentialism, full or even partial
religious beliefs are unjustified, then, given the hegemony of
evidentialism there is an overriding reason to reject those beliefs.
Perhaps the clearest exponent of this position is the comparatively
recent Clifford whose use of moral vocabulary conveys well the
overriding character of the reasons epistemology is said to provide.
His position is summed up in the famous quotation: "It is wrong
always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon
insufficient evidence" (Clifford 1879: 186).




At the other extreme from Clifford is the position of
*fideism*, namely, that if an epistemological theory such as
evidentialism conflicts with the holding of religious beliefs
then that is so much the worse for the epistemological theory.




The rejection of the hegemony of epistemology is quite compatible
with holding a hegemony thesis for a fragment of epistemology. Such a
fragment might, for instance, contain the principle of
self-referential consistency, relied upon by Plantinga (1983:
60). This states that it is not justified to have a belief according
to which that belief is itself not justified. Consider, for instance,
the extreme case of the person who believes that no belief is
justified unless it can be proven from premises everyone agrees
upon. 




Postmodernism implies more than being post modern in the above sense.
For it is the rejection of the hegemony of even a fragment of
epistemology. That might seem agreeable to fideists. Postmodernism
tends, however, to trivialize fideism by obliterating any contrast
between faith in divine revelation and trust in human capacities to
discover the truth. (For a discussion of fideism and postmodernism see
Stiver 2003.) 




Much contemporary epistemology of religion seeks to avoid the extremes
both of the Enlightenment thesis of the hegemony of evidentialism and
of fideism. It is thus post modern without necessarily being
postmodernist. Call the injunction to avoid these extremes
the *problematic* of contemporary epistemology of religion.


## 3. Evidentialism Defended




One response to the problematic is to separate evidentialism from the
hegemony of epistemology. Evidentialism may then be defended by noting
how we implicitly rely upon evidentialist principles in many different
areas of enquiry, or by noting which principles generalise various
particular examples of justified and unjustified
reasoning. Such a defence of evidentialism is part of
the project of some contemporary philosophers who seek to attack
theism in favour of agnosticism and/or atheism. This defence may well
be implicit in Flew's famous "The Presumption of Atheism"
(1972). It is more explicit in Scriven's
*Primary Philosophy* (1966, ch 4). Scriven and Flew are relying
on the Ockhamist principle that, in the absence of evidence for the
existence of things of kind *X*, belief in *X*s is
not reasonable. This they can defend by means of examples in which
non-Ockhamist thinking is judged not to be justified. So even if the
whole of evidentialism is not defended, the Ockhamist fragment of it
may be.




Not surprisingly the reliance of non-theist philosophers on
evidentialism has been criticised. First there is an ad hominem.
Shalkowski (1989) has pointed out that these defenders of
evidentialism tend in fact to be atheists not agnostics, yet a careful
examination, he says, of the examples used to support Ockham's
Razor show that either they are ones in which there is independent
evidence for denying the existence of *X*s or ones in which
suspense of judgement seems to be the appropriate response, not
denial. Another criticism is Plantinga's claim that
evidentialism is self-referentially inconsistent for there is no
evidence for evidentialism (Plantinga 1983: 60). This might be met in
either of two ways. First, it could be said that all that is being
defended is the Ockhamist fragment of evidentialism and that this is
not itself vulnerable to Ockham's Razor. Or it could be argued
that deriving an epistemology from a wide range of examples is
evidence for it. To be sure this is far from conclusive evidence. But
even a less than full belief in an epistemological thesis which showed
theism to be unjustified would be damaging. This may be illustrated
using an example with artificial numerical precision: 80% confidence
in an epistemology which showed that no degree of belief in theism
greater than 60% was justified is incompatible with a degree of belief
in theism greater than 68%. The person in question could have a
degree of belief of in the conjunction of theism and the (80% likely)
epistemology of no greater than 48% (80% of 60%) and a degree of
belief in the conjunction of theism and the denial of that
epistemology of no greater than 20% (since that epistemology has a
probability of 80%).



## 4. Natural theology




Theistic philosophers may, of course, grant evidentialism and even
grant its hegemony, but defend theism by providing the case which
evidentialists demand. Here the details of the arguments are not
within the scope of an article on epistemology. What is of interest is
the *kind* of argument put forward. For a start there is the
project of *demonstrating* God's existence, and this project is
not restricted to neo-Thomists. (See Craig 1979, Braine 1988, Miller
1991.) To show the justifiability of full belief that there is a God
it is sufficient (a) to have a deductively valid argument from
premisses which are themselves justifiably held with full belief
unless defeated by an objection and (b) to have considered and
defeated all available objections to either the premisses, the
conclusion or any intermediate steps. Some of the premisses of these
arguments are said to be self-evident, that is, obvious once you think
about it. (E.g., the denial of the explanatory power of an infinite
causal regress, or the principle that the existence of any composite
thing needs to be explained). And that raises a further
epistemological problem. Does something's being self-evident to you
justify your full belief in it even if you know of those of equal or
greater intellectual ability to whom it is not self-evident?




Many natural theologians have, however, abandoned the search for
demonstrative arguments, appealing instead to ones which are probable,
either in the sense of having weight but being inconclusive or in the
sense of having a mathematical probability assigned to them. Notable
in this regard are Mitchell's cumulative argument (Mitchell 1973) and
Swinburne's Bayesian reliance on probability (Swinburne 1979). In a
popular exposition of his argument Swinburne appeals instead to an
inference to the best explanation (Swinburne 1995; see also Forrest
1996). While there are differences of approach, the common theme is
that there is evidence for theism but evidence of a probable rather
than a conclusive kind, justifying belief but not full belief.


## 5. The Relevance of Newman




Although pre-dating the current debate, John Henry Newman's
rejection of Locke's and Paley's evidentialism is relevant
to the problematic of contemporary epistemology of religion. First he
quite clearly rejected the hegemony of epistemology. His procedure was
to examine how in fact people made up their minds on non-religious
issues and argue that by the same standards religious beliefs were
justified. As a result he qualified evidentialism by insisting that
an *implicit* and
*cumulative* argument could lead to justified certainty. (See
Mitchell 1990.) 




Newman's position has two interpretations. One, which differs little
from Swinburne's probabilistic approach to natural theology, asserts
that the consilience of a number of independent pieces of probable
reasoning can result in a probability so high as to be negligibly
different from certainty. If, to use an example Newman would not have
liked, Aquinas's five ways were independent and each had probability
75% then taken together their probability is about 99.9%. One
difficulty with this interpretation is that even a highly probable
argument differs from a demonstration in that the former is vulnerable
to probabilistic counter-arguments. Thus a probabilistic version of
the Argument from Evil might subsequently reduce the probability from
99.9% down to 75% again.




The other interpretation of Newman's position is to say that
evidentialism falsely presupposes that there are fine gradations on a
scale from full belief through partial belief to partial disbelief to
full disbelief. Newman claims that human beings are not like that when
it comes to those beliefs which form part of religious faith. In such
cases the only available states are those of full belief and full
disbelief or, perhaps, full belief, and lack of full belief. Of course
someone can believe that theism has a probability between 90% and 60%,
say, but that could be interpreted as believing that relative to the
evidence theism has a probability between 90% and 60%, which, in turn,
is a comment on the strength of the case for theism not the expression
of a merely partial belief.




If Newman is right then evidentialism is slightly wrong. Instead of
requiring belief to be proportioned to the evidence, full belief is
justified if the case for it holds "on the balance of
probabilities". Hence a natural theology consisting of merely
probable arguments, such as Swinburne's, can still show full
religious belief to be justified.


## 6. Wittgensteinian Fideism




Another reaction to the problematic is Wittgensteinian fideism, the
thesis that there are various different "language games",
and that while it is appropriate to ask questions about justification
within a language game it is a mistake to ask about the justification
of "playing" the game in question. In this way
epistemology is relativised to language games, themselves related to
forms of life, and the one used for assessing religious claims is less
stringent than evidentialism. Here there seems to be both an autonomy
thesis and an incommensurability thesis. The autonomy thesis tells us
that religious utterances are only to be judged as justified or
otherwise by the standards implicit in the religious form of life, and
this may be further restricted to Christianity or Hinduism, or any
other religion (Malcolm 1992). The incommensurability thesis tells us
that religious utterances are unlike scientific or metaphysical claims
and so we are confusing different uses of language if we judge
religious utterances by the standards of science or metaphysics
(Phillips 1992). Stress on the autonomy thesis brings Wittgensteinian
fideism close to the fideism of many religious conservatives, but
stress on the incommensurability thesis brings it close to the extreme
liberal position of Braithwaite (1955), namely that religion is about
attitudes not facts, which would, of course, be rejected by religious
conservatives.




Perhaps the most obvious criticism of Wittgensteinian fideism is that
even if the underlying theory of forms of life and language games is
granted, it is an historical fact, itself justified by the criteria of
the "game" of history, that the tradition to which the
majority of Jews, Christians and Muslims belong to is a form of life
with heavy metaphysical commitments, and in which such utterances as
"There is a God" are intended as much like "There is
a star ten times more massive than the Sun" as like "There
is hope". So Wittgensteinian fideism is only appropriate for
such religions as Zen Buddhism and for some, relatively recent,
liberal strands of Judaism and Christianity which have rejected the
traditional metaphysical commitment (as in Cupitt 1984).



The Wittgensteinian position could be modified to allow a metaphysical
"language game" with its own criteria for justification
etc, and in which natural theology should be pursued. Then the
Judeo-Christian-Islamic "language game" would be part of
this larger, autonomous metaphysical "language game". That
modified account would cohere with the historical fact of the
metaphysical commitment of that religious tradition. In that case,
though, it would seem that, not just the Judeo-Christian-Islamic
"language game", but all serious intellectual enquiry
should also be treated as parts of the one "game", with
one set of rules. Thus Wittgensteinian fideism would have been
qualified out of existence.




Even if you reject Wittgensteinian fideism you might still take a lesson
from it. For it must surely be granted that religious utterances are
not made in a purely intellectual way. Their entanglement with
commitment to a way of life and their emotional charge might help to
explain the fact, if it is one, that those who take religion
seriously, whether believers or not, do not in fact have a continuous
range of degrees of confidence but operate instead with full belief or
full disbelief. For, normally, emotionally charged beliefs are either
full on or full off, and in abnormal cases tend to be divided rather
than partial. Thus, confronted with conflicting evidence about whether
your affection is reciprocated you are far less likely to suspend
judgement than to oscillate between full belief and full
disbelief. Likewise it seems more normal to oscillate between full
belief in God in moments of crisis and full disbelief when things go
well than to suspend judgement at all times. This ties in with the
Newmanian modification of evidentialism, mentioned above.


## 7. Reformed Epistemology




An influential contemporary rejection of evidentialism is *reformed
epistemology*, due to Wolterstorff (1976) and Plantinga (1983). As
Plantinga develops it in his paper (1983), beliefs
are *warranted* without Enlightenment-approved evidence
provided they are (a) grounded, and (b) defended against known
objections. Such beliefs may then themselves be used as evidence for
other beliefs. But what grounding amounts to could be debated. Later,
Plantinga proposed an account of warrant as proper functioning. This
account seems to entail that *S*'s belief that *p*
is grounded in event *E* if (a) in the circumstances *E*
caused *S* to believe that *p*, and
(b) *S*'s coming to believe that *p* was a case of
proper functioning (Plantinga 1993b). It should be noted that the term
"warrant" used elsewhere in philosophy as a synonym for
"justified" (as in "warranted assertibility")
is used by Plantinga to mean that which has to be adjoined to a true
belief for it to be knowledge. (See Plantinga 1993a). Accordingly the
most pressing criticism of Plantinga's later position is that it
largely ignores the question of justification, or reasonableness
which, as Swinburne explicates it (Swinburne 2001) amounts to whether
the religious beliefs are probable relative to total evidence.




While the details of grounding might be controversial it may be assumed
that reformed epistemologists assert that ordinary religious
experiences of awe, gratitude, contrition, etc., ground the beliefs
implied by the believer's sincere reports of such experiences, provided
they can be said to cause those beliefs. Such grounded beliefs are
warranted provided they can be defended against known objections. They
can then be used as evidence for further religious beliefs. Thus if
religious experience grounds the belief that God has forgiven you for
doing what is wrong to other humans beings, then that is evidence for a
personal God who acts in a morally upright fashion. For, it can be
argued, only such a God would find anything to forgive in the wrongs you
do to your fellow human beings.




Jerome Gellman (1992, 2017) draws our attention to the experience of
godlessness. This is occasioned by, but not inferred from, the evils
that surround us. If Reformed Epistemology is correct this would seem
to ground atheism in the same way that the experience of forgiveness
can ground theism.




One difference between reformed epistemology and fideism is that the
former requires defence against known objections, whereas the latter
might dismiss such objections as either irrelevant or, worse,
intellectual temptations. Included in the objections are not only
those such as the Argument from Evil that seek to rebut, but arguments
from sociology and, more recently, cognitive science that seek to
undermine by proposing a naturalistic cause for basic religious
beliefs. For instance, Justin Barrett (2004) posits a HADD
(hyperactive/hypersensitive agency detection device), suggesting that
a sensitive agency detection device functions properly if the goal is
survival but is hypersensitive if the goal is truth. This
hypersensitivity then explains the human tendency towards supernatural
beliefs, undermining the proper basicality of those beliefs. Clark and
Barrett (2011) suggest that this hypersensitivity could itself be part
of the divine plan. An alternative, Bayesian, theistic response would
be that HADD exaggerates a properly basic probability for theism that
is neither high nor too low prior to further evidence. This justifies
a part evidentialist, part reformed, program of assessing the
all-things-considered probability resulting from the effect of
evidence on this basic probability.



A difference between reformed epistemology and Wittgensteinian fideism
is that the former proposes a universal relaxation of the stringent
conditions of evidentialism while the latter only proposes a
relaxation for some"language games", including
religion.




Reformed epistemology could be correct and yet far less significant
than its proponents take it to be. That would occur if in fact rather
few religious beliefs are grounded in the sorts of ordinary religious
experiences most believers have. For it may well be that the beliefs
are part of the cause of the experience rather than the other way round
(Katz 1978).


## 8. Religious Experience, Revelation and Tradition



Reformed epistemology might be thought of as a modification of
evidentialism in which the permissible kinds of evidence are expanded.
Notable in this context is Alston's work arguing that
certain kinds of religious experience can be assimilated to perception
(Alston 1991).




The difference between reformed epistemology and Enlightenment-style
evidentialism is also shown by a consideration of revelation and
inspiration. An evidentialist will consider arguments from the premiss
that it is said such and such was revealed or the premiss that so and
so claimed to be inspired by God, but a reformed epistemologist might
allow as warranted those religious beliefs grounded in the event of
revelation or inspiration. Thus Mavrodes has argued that any belief
due to a genuine revelation is warranted, and has discussed several
modes of revelation (Mavrodes 1988). Zagzebski argues that this would
have the unacceptable consequence that warrant, and hence knowledge,
becomes *totally* inaccessible either to the person concerned
or the community (Zagzebski 1993a: 204-205). For instance, Mavrodes
would probably not consider Ramanujan's belief that Krishna is divine
as warranted, but even if Mavrodes is correct Ramanujan would have no
access to this truth about the unwarranted character of his own
beliefs. A similar criticism could be made of beliefs grounded in
religious experience. In both cases, the question of whether a belief
is genuinely grounded in religious experience or is genuinely grounded
in inspiration is one that several religious traditions have paid
attention to, with such theories as that of discernment of spirits
(Murphy, 1990, ch 5).




In what might be called "counter-reformed epistemology"
it could be allowed that a belief can be warranted if grounded in a
religious tradition. Such a belief would have to be caused in the right
sort of way by the right sort of tradition. As in the previous cases we
might note that such grounding should be partially accessible to the
believer. Rather little work has been done on this
extension of reformed epistemology, but the social dimension of warrant
has been noted (Zagzebski 1993a).




More recently Plantinga (2000) has defended a rather different account of
divine inspiration, which he calls the Aquinas/Calvin model. This
relies upon the doctrine of 'original sin' claiming that
most humans suffer from a cognitive-affective disorder, but that as a
result of Redemption the Holy Spirit heals us so that we are able to
function properly, and come to believe the Christian revelation in an
immediate, non-inferential manner. In this way the Aquinas/Calvin
model supports the Christian metaphysics, which in turn supports the
Aquinas/Calvin model. Presumably it will be granted that the
probability, *y*, of the Aquinas/Calvin model given Christian
metaphysics is significantly less than 100%, because there are rival
Christian models. As a consequence, the probability, *z*, of
Christian metaphysics is less than *x*/(1[?]*y*)
where *x* is the probability of Christian metaphysics given the
falsity of the Aquinas/Calvin model. Hence Plantinga's proposal can
succeed only if either *y* is near 100% or *x* is not
too small.


## 9. Religious Disagreement




Religious disagreement is a long-standing problem in philosophy of
religion, but in this century there has been great interest in
disagreements between theists and atheists as well as the
disagreements between followers of various religions. (See Kelly 2005,
Christensen 2007, Feldman 2007, Kraft 2007, Feldman and Warfield 2011,
Christensen and Lackey 2013) The problem here is obvious: how can
sincere intelligent people disagree? Should not both disputants
suspend judgement? To be sure, sometimes those who disagree with you
are your intellectual inferiors in some respect. Consider, for
instance, someone who insisted that p was precisely 22/7. Those who
know of and can follow a proof that p is an irrational number may
justifiably dismiss that person as a mathematical ignoramus. The case
of interest, however, is that in which no such inferiority is on
public display. This is referred to as a situation of *public
epistemic parity*. Richard Feldman criticizes the relativist
solution to the problem, namely that there is not always a unique
reasonable doxastic attitude to a given proposition in a given
epistemic situation. He also rejects unargued dismissal, and reaches
the conclusion that in situations of epistemic parity disputants
should suspend judgement. Many, however, agree with Peter van Inwagen
who, in his autobiographical 'Quam Delicta' (1994),
implies that it is justified for both parties in a dispute to appeal
to what is privately available to them. Such private assertions of
epistemic superiority are often expressed by saying that someone
"just does not get the point". Typically, not getting the
point requires a cognitive blind-spot. It is not that you know there
is a point you cannot grasp, which reasonably requires some deference
to those who claim to grasp it. You fail to see there is a point. A
somewhat different response to Feldman is that of Forrest (2019), who
argues that when the cases for and against a thesis are of different
kinds we may sometimes *commit* to the thesis, because
non-comparability is not the same as epistemic parity.




One obvious complication concerning religious disagreements is the
appeal to divine inspiration, as a source of private epistemic
superiority, as in Plantinga's "Aquinas/Calvin" model
(Plantinga 2000). It is hard to see, though, how this could apply to
disputes between two religions that both rely on the role of divine
inspiration. Perhaps the only substitute for unargued dismissal is
argued dismissal.