Doctoral dissertations in the Nordic countries 2003

The purpose of this article is to discuss how the possibility of being fallible fits together with religious convictions and practices. By fallibilism, it is usually meant that all our beliefs are only fallibly justified, at best. This entails that even for our best-argued beliefs, it remains possible that they can be rationally doubted. Recently, this idea has found its way to theological deliberation as well. The upside of the idea is that it enables one to dodge the charges of absolutism or immutability. The downside is that it seems to make religious belief only tentative, and unable to motivate action. In the following, I will shortly present some recent fallibilist proposals of Christian identity, and then reflect on the possibility of holding religious beliefs fallibly against the background of the demand of certitude and action. Finally, I will propose a model of Christian fallibility, based on virtue epistemology, which avoids some of the problems inherent in current models.