Wittgenstein,Quasi-fideism,and Scepticism

In the discussion of certainties, or ‘hinges’, in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty some of the examples that Wittgenstein uses are religious ones. He remarks on how a child might be raised so that they ‘swallow down’ belief in God (§107) and in discussing the role of persuasion in disagreements he asks us to think of the case of missionaries converting natives (§612). In the past decade Duncan Pritchard has made a case for an account of the rationality of religious belief inspired by On Certainty which he calls ‘quasi-fideism’. Pritchard argues that religious beliefs are just like ordinary non-religious beliefs in presupposing fundamental arational commitments. However, Modesto Gómez-Alonso has recently argued that there are significant differences between the kinds of ‘hinges’ discussed in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty and religious beliefs such that we should expect an account of rationality in religion to be quite different to the account of rational practices and their foundations that we find in Wittgenstein’s work. Fundamental religious commitments are, as Wittgenstein said, in the foreground of the religious believer’s life whereas hinge commitments are said to be in the background. People are passionately committed to their religious beliefs but it is not at all clear that people are passionately committed to hinges such as that ‘I have two hands’. I argue here that although there are differences between religious beliefs and many of the hinge-commitments discussed in On Certainty religious beliefs are nonetheless hinge-like. Gómez-Alonso’s criticisms of Pritchard mischaracterise his views and something like Pritchard’s quasi-fideism is the correct account of the rationality of religious belief.

     

The correlates of traditional religious beliefs in Britain

This study provides an across time analysis of traditional religious beliefs and examines the socio-structural and religious correlates of such beliefs in Britain. It examines belief in God, life after death, hell, heaven, sin, as well as the notion of a personal God. It undertakes multivariate analysis of a recurrent social survey conducted over several decades. The main findings are that there is no uniform decline in traditional beliefs, with the picture one of change and continuity. Women, religious adherents and those showing greater religious commitment are more likely to hold traditional beliefs. There is a mixed picture for age effects while higher socio-economic status tends to lead to a lower likelihood of holding religious beliefs, as hypothesised by ‘deprivation theory’.     

Can One Be Cognitively Conscious of God?

How do humans ‘register’ God: attain knowledge or revelation of God? Analysis is familiar in terms of explanatory hypothesis, necessity, authority and commitment. However individuals speak also of ‘experience’ or ‘consciousness’ of God/Christ/grace – received widely, not just by an esoteric few. But may we properly hold that people can be cognitively aware of God? Undoubtedly such speech has problematic aspects. Not only do psychosis, self-deception, gullibility recur. Commentators are liable to enlist what may be termed the A-conceptual Lucidity picture, which critically fails. Various positions urged by thinkers rule out by definition the very possibility of cognitive awareness of God. Some analysts assert: a person’s experiencing x is constituted throughout by the person’s use of concepts in toto reached previously and independently. But, why adopt any a priori dismissiveness? We should favour a portrayal of people’s epistemic situation respecting God called the Consciousness Portrayal. Phrases therein include: ‘God’s gracious, guiding activity’; ‘a person’s access to God’; ‘attentive consciousness/conceptualization/knowledge of God’; ‘diverse levels or modes of consciousness’; ‘God’s guidance in a person’s creatively picking out concepts’; and ‘“cognition” which, as regards meaning, is not just a function of calculative reasoning’. Alertness to usage in non-religious contexts aids our finding the religious phrasing intelligible. The Portrayal is approachable from an internal and external angle. Opponents’ challenges to the Portrayal invoke some broad epistemological theses, often pronounced intrinsic to ‘rationality’. But we fittingly espouse certain contrasting epistemological views. And these prove to fortify the Consciousness Portrayal.     

The Problem of Criteria and the Necessity of Natural Theology

Most streams of Christianity have emphasized the unknowability of God, but they have also asserted that Christ is the criterion through whom we may have limited access to the depths of God, and through whose life and death we can formulate the doctrine of God as Triune. This standpoint, however, leads to certain complications regarding ‘translating’ the Christian message to adherents of other religious traditions, and in particular the question, ‘Why do you accept Christ as the criterion?’, is one that Christian thinkers have attempted to answer in different ways. There are two influential responses to this query in recent Christian thought: an ‘evidentialist’ approach which gradually moves from a theistic metaphysics to a Christ‐centred soteriology, and an ‘unapologetic’ standpoint which takes God's self‐disclosure in Christ as the perspectival lens through which to view the world. The opposition between these two groups is primarily over the status of ‘natural theology’, that is, whether we may speak of a ‘natural’ reason, which human beings possess even outside the circle of the Christian revelation, and through which they may arrive at some minimalist understanding of the divine reality. I outline the status of ‘natural theology’ in these strands of contemporary Christian thought, from Barthian ‘Christomonism’ to post‐liberal theology to Reformed epistemology, and suggest certain problems within these standpoints which indicate the need for an appropriately qualified ‘natural theology’. Most of the criticisms leveled against ‘natural theology’, whether from secular philosophers or from Christian theologians themselves, can be put in two groups: first, the arguments for God's existence are logically flawed, and, second, even if they succeed they do not point to the Triune God that Christians worship. In contrast to such an old‐fashioned ‘natural theology’ which allegedly starts from premises self‐evidently true for all rational agents and leads through an inexorable logic to God, the qualified version is an attempt to spell out the doctrinal beliefs of Christianity such as the existence of a personal God who interacts with human beings in different ways, and outline the reasons offered in defence of such statements. In other words, without denying that Christian doctrines operate at one level as the grammatical rules which structure the Christian discourse, such a natural theology insists on the importance of the question of whether these utterances are true, in the sense that they refer to an objective reality which is independent of the Christian life‐world. Such a ‘natural theology’, as the discussion will emphasize, is not an optional extra but follows in fact from the internal logic of the Christian position on the universality of God's salvific reach.     

God Regulates the Church,Even If He Doesn't – Wittgensteinian Philosophy of Religion and Realism

Far from being non-realism or antirealism, Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion shows the meaning of practices within which the whole weight is in the picture that God speaks. ‘The authority of the community of believers determines what is the word of God’ does not contradict ‘God himself determines what is the word of God.’ As is shown by an example of Peter Winch, the distinction between inside and outside perspectives on religious practices is already given in those practices themselves. Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion does justice to the independent reality of God, without the adjustments proposed by Stephen Mulhall and Andrew Moore.     

Duns Scotus’ univocity: applied to the debate on phenomenological theology

Scotus’ theory of univocity is described: his exact definition of univocity and his view of transcendental concepts that are ‘simply simple’. These concepts are said to be univocally applied to God and creatures. Next, we describe Scotus’ views on univocity in ‘being’ and the precise meaning of the infinite and finite ‘mode’ of being. Finally, we apply these results to work of Heidegger and Marion. It appears that they had an insufficient grasp of the intricacies of Scotus’ theory of univocity and that Marion’s religious phenomenology could have benefitted from these scotistic tools.     

Credulism

Conclusion The credulity principle approach to the issue of the rationality of religious belief is a clear advance over the proof approach. For the proof approach, in the end, is simply too wedded to an infallibilist conception of rational belief; and initially, at least, the credulity principle approach seems to avoid this conception. In the end, however, it affirms that same viewpoint; for if it does not embody an infallibilist conception of epistemic principles, its critical property of intersubjectivity is beyond defense. Thus, in recognizing the inadequacy of infallibilist conceptions of rationality, we can see the inadequacy of both the proof approach and the credulity principle approach to the existence of God. It is simply false that the experiences of others is efficacious in conferring rationality on our beliefs.But if neither of these approaches is adequate, how is one to approach the issue of the rationality of religious belief? The subjective nature of rational belief provides the answer - if one wishes to argue that God exists, one will have to provide as many arguments as there are divergent sets of acceptable epistemic principles. There still is a place for such arguments; but only given the assumption that we share views about what sorts of inferences are proper, or that other arguments can be constructed for the superiority of certain epistemic principles. The view that must be given up, however, is that the discussions philosophers have of these issues need bear any relation to whether or not the normal religious believer has a reasonable belief or not - he does not need there to be a good philosophical argument that God exists in order to reasonably believe that God exists. Nor is any non-believer necessarily irrational just because there is such a good argument.Thus, once the nature of rational belief is properly appreciated, it appears that the question of the rationality of religious belief is not a central question any longer. Whether such beliefs are rational is a quite subjective question not capable of being answered by any sort of universal generalization about all religious believers and/or non-believers.     

The noetic effects of sin: a dispositional framework

One of the well-known theses of Alvin Plantinga’s epistemology of religious belief is his claim about the noetic effects of sin. But Plantinga does not clearly spell out how sin functions to undermine or weaken the believer’s natural knowledge of God. In this paper, I want to suggest a dispositional gloss on his account of religious epistemology that properly identifies the epistemic role of sin and other factors that may undermine knowledge of God. It will be further argued that the dispositional framework provides us with a principled basis for deriving some of the main contours of Plantinga’s general epistemology.

     

Rationality and autonomy from the Enlightenment and Islamic perspectives

Rationality and autonomy are foundational concepts in anglophone or ‘Western’ countries that originated primarily from the Enlightenment period. When compared with ‘Western’ ideologies, non-Western belief systems such as Islam may not appear, at first glance, to place as much emphasis on the value and attainment of rationality and autonomy. This may lead some people to conclude that Islam necessarily marginalises or even suppresses its believers’ development of rationality and autonomy. This article compares the concepts of rationality and autonomy from the Enlightenment and Islamic perspectives. It is argued that there exist Islamic traditions that promote the inculcation of ‘normal rationality’ and ‘normal autonomy’ within a convictional community from which beliefs develop. However, the extent to which Muslims are encouraged to cultivate and exercise their rationality and autonomy would depend, among other factors, on the specific interpretations of rationality and autonomy privileged by the Islamic tradition they belong to.     

Spirituality and Sexuality: An Exploration of the Religious Beliefs of Non-Heterosexual Christians in Great Britain

Abstract

This article analyzes the religious beliefs of 565 gay, lesbian and bisexual Christians, focusing on God, Jesus Christ and the Bible. Most respondents saw no conflict between their sexualities and their Christian faith. The examination of these religious beliefs uncovers themes that appear to be influenced by their social circumstances, the core of which being their stigmatized sexualities. Their beliefs of God were consistent with the ‘love and justice’ theme of queer theology. Jesus Christ was perceived as a good role model committed to social justice. Although the divinity of Christ was acknowledged, they did not consider him the exclusive way to salvation. The Bible was considered still relevant to everyday life. It was, however, not regarded as the sole guide for Christian living, and it should be interpreted through the lens of shifting socio-cultural realities and personal experiences. On the whole, the data seem to suggest that the respondents' personal experiences and collective social circumstances have an impact on their religious beliefs.     

Beliefs in and About God and Attitudes Toward Voluntary Euthanasia

I use data from the General Social Survey to evaluate several hypotheses regarding how beliefs in and about God predict attitudes toward voluntary euthanasia. I find that certainty in the belief in God significantly predicts negative attitudes toward voluntary euthanasia. I also find that belief in a caring God and in a God that is the primary source of moral rules significantly predicts negative attitudes toward voluntary euthanasia. I also find that respondents’ beliefs about the how close they are to God and how close they want to be with God predict negative attitudes toward voluntary euthanasia. These associations hold even after controlling for religious affiliation, religious attendance, views of the Bible, and sociodemographic factors. The findings indicate that to understand individuals’ attitudes about voluntary euthanasia, one must pay attention to their beliefs in and about God.     

‘SEEKE TRUE RELIGION. OH,WHERE?’

We precipitately express opinions about religion without reflecting critically on our conception of it, and may blame it for conduct that the religious traditions themselves judge unbecoming. A distinction can be drawn between the raw, natural self of the untrained person and the well‐tempered demeanour of a spiritually developed person. Such a distinction drives the appropriation of religious beliefs and can survive their demise. ‘Religious belief’ is not to be conflated with Abrahamic notions of ‘belief in God’ and ‘faith’. There are other versions of transcendence and other psycho‐dramas. One possible form of transcendence is available within the moral life of human beings.     

The ‘Holy Mother’ and the shadow: revisiting Jung's work on the quaternity

Through a series of clinical vignettes, this paper considers the impact of religious belief, specifically Roman Catholicism, on the psyche and development of mind; in particular, there will be a focus on the influences of the conflation of maternal beliefs with a Catholic belief system when the loss or absence of the father is a primary factor. Further, it will be shown in case examples that split off aspects of the personal shadow such as conflicted and aggressive emotions related to mother and father can conflate with the collective numinous and religious aspects of the ‘dark side’ of the God‐representation and result in ‘religious’ persecutory symptoms. This has a debilitating effect on the emerging personality, leaving it prone to fears, anxieties and psychotic pockets of experience when there is a numinous persecutory shadow in the background that affects and limits the individual's development. The implications and findings drawn from the clinical vignettes are used to consider the impact of an interrelationship and conflation between aspects of the psyche and religious beliefs. Jung's work on the Trinity and the ‘problem of the fourth’ (Jung 1942/1948/1991) is also reconsidered in relation to the role of the feminine, the maternal and the ‘reality of matter’. A diagram of the multiple levels of the quaternity is used to elaborate and expand on Jung's concept. © 2013, The Society of Analytical Psychology     

Who Believes in a Male God? Ideological Beliefs and Gendered Conceptualizations of God

Recent studies have explored whether certain conceptualizations of God are associated with various attitudes and beliefs. In the current study, we examined the relationship between gendered God concepts and the belief that God is involved in one’s life and religious-related rigid ideologies (i.e., religious fundamentalism and right-wing authoritarianism [RWA]). Across two studies, one conducted with religious students at a Jesuit university and the other with a national sample, we found that individuals who believed God to be male were more likely to believe that God had more control and involvement in their life, had higher levels of religious fundamentalism and higher levels of RWA-Aggression (Study 1 and 2), RWA–Submission (Study 1 and 2), and RWA–Conventionalism (Study 2) than individuals with other gendered or nongendered conceptualizations of God. Implications of the broader impact that gendered God concepts have on social and political domains are explored. Last, limitations and future research directions are discussed.     

The relationship between religious beliefs and behaviours and changes in Spiritual Health Locus of Control over time in a national sample of African-Americans

Using data from a sample of African-Americans, the present study examined the role of religious beliefs and behaviours in predicting changes in Spiritual Health Locus of Control (SHLOC), or beliefs about the role that God plays in a person’s health. A national sample of African-American adults was recruited using a telephone survey and re-contacted 2.5 years later. Overall, results indicated that both higher religious beliefs and behaviours predicted increases in Active SHLOC, or the view that one collaboratively works with God to maintain one’s health. However, only religious behaviours predicted increases in Passive SHLOC, or the view that because God is in complete control of health that one’s own behaviours are unnecessary. Among men, religious beliefs predicted strengthening Active SHLOC beliefs, while religious behaviours predicted growing Passive SHLOC beliefs. Among women, religious behaviours predicted strengthening Active and Passive SHLOC beliefs.     

Big Gods,socio-cultural evolution and the non-obvious merits of a sociological interpretation

ABSTRACT

Much of the recent, renewed interest in the cultural evolution of religion has been driven by findings in experimental and cognitive psychology, and, as a result of disciplinary boundaries, sociologists have engaged very little with this new data and theory. In order to bring sociology formally back into this discussion, we provide in this paper five sociological sources for the birth and diffusion of ‘Big God’ ideation (with monotheism serving as a paradigmatic case). Agentically, we suggest that Big God beliefs assuaged existential anxiety, aided in elite legitimation and were useful for religious entrepreneurs hoping to establish new institutional fields. Structurally, we suggest that Big God beliefs may have been an epiphenomenal attempt by people to symbolically represent the centralization of political authority and the intensified use of new technologies. We conclude with a general theory of the cultural evolution of Big Gods that integrates these agentic and structural explanations.     

Modernity and rural religion in the Philippines

The present paper concerns religious beliefs and practices— relating to the national hero of the Philippines Jose Rizal—of a religious community that calls itself Ciudad Mistica de Dios (the Mystical City of God). In the late 1950s, Mistica established its headquarters on the lower slopes of the holy mountain, Mount Banahaw. The paper commences by reading a selection of ‘nationalist’ constructions of the life and death of Jose Rizal through Bauman's conception of ‘modernity’ as ‘cultivating action’ and Foucault's notion of ‘pastoral power’. This is juxtaposed with Mistica's reading of Rizal—a reading that constructs Rizal's life and death as a mirror to the life and death of Christ, and that emerges as a critical engagement with modernity and the state. The paper concludes by suggesting that local religious beliefs and practices must be interpreted in terms of the historical experiences of particular peoples and places.     

Responsibility beyond rationality: the case for rhizomatic consequentialism

A key challenge for education is to encourage children to act responsibly. If ‘spiritual literacy’ does not involve an autonomous, rational soul capable of ‘reading and writing the world as God intended’, it must refer to ethical (and perhaps religious) capacity in relation to contingent actions in a context free of moral absolutes. In relation to the former, Kant's Categorical Imperative supposed that actions are either right or wrong according to an absolute reason derived from the most basic templates of human sense making. According to Kant, therefore, right is rational irrespective of the apparent consequences of specific actions. In contrast, in an age lacking Kant's beliefs in both God and absolute reason, it is tempting to see an unethical pragmatism as the only alternative to the Categorical Imperative. However, it is possible to instil responsibility through a consequentialism based on a broader conception of relatedness, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the ‘rhizome’. ‘Rhizomatic consequentialism’, as here defined, provides a ‘third way’ for moral education between instilling an understanding of absolute right and wrong and encouraging the belief that ‘right is what you can get away with’.     

Ecology: Religious or Secular?

‘Ecology: religious or secular?’ addresses the issue of the relation between ecology and the idea of God. ‘Social’ interpretations of ecology seem to fit with traditional Christian models, such as stewardship, for grasping the relation between humanity and nature. ‘Deep’ interpretations of ecology, in which nature is understood to encompass humanity, appear, by contrast, less amenable to assimilation by Christianity. The choice – for so it is often presented – between ‘deep’ and ‘social’ forms of ecology is thus a test case for Christianity. Does the Christian theologian opt for ‘social’ ecology because it best addresses the issue of human embeddedness in nature or because it fits better with prior metaphysical commitments? This article argues that the only way such a dilemma can be addressed theologically is by thinking through at a fundamental level the character of God’s relation to the world. An enquiry in philosophical theology, through the consideration of the concept of divine simplicity, it is argued, suggests that Christianity is not condemned to ‘religious’ readings of ecology. That is, Christianity is not obliged to select evidence based on criteria derived from prior theological commitments (e.g. to the model of stewardship). Instead, beginning in the concept of God enables a truly ‘secular’ enquiry which acknowledges a wide range of evidence of our materiality. Indeed, such a ‘secular’ enquiry can only be established by reference to the idea of God.     

Analytic cognitive style predicts religious and paranormal belief

An analytic cognitive style denotes a propensity to set aside highly salient intuitions when engaging in problem solving. We assess the hypothesis that an analytic cognitive style is associated with a history of questioning, altering, and rejecting (i.e., unbelieving) supernatural claims, both religious and paranormal. In two studies, we examined associations of God beliefs, religious engagement (attendance at religious services, praying, etc.), conventional religious beliefs (heaven, miracles, etc.) and paranormal beliefs (extrasensory perception, levitation, etc.) with performance measures of cognitive ability and analytic cognitive style. An analytic cognitive style negatively predicted both religious and paranormal beliefs when controlling for cognitive ability as well as religious engagement, sex, age, political ideology, and education. Participants more willing to engage in analytic reasoning were less likely to endorse supernatural beliefs. Further, an association between analytic cognitive style and religious engagement was mediated by religious beliefs, suggesting that an analytic cognitive style negatively affects religious engagement via lower acceptance of conventional religious beliefs. Results for types of God belief indicate that the association between an analytic cognitive style and God beliefs is more nuanced than mere acceptance and rejection, but also includes adopting less conventional God beliefs, such as Pantheism or Deism. Our data are consistent with the idea that two people who share the same cognitive ability, education, political ideology, sex, age and level of religious engagement can acquire very different sets of beliefs about the world if they differ in their propensity to think analytically.