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What if there is no strong evidence that God exists? Is belief in God when faced with a lack of evidence illegitimate and improper? Evidentialism answers yes. According to Evidentialism, it is impermissible to believe any proposition lacking adequate evidence. And, if any thesis enjoys the status of a dogma among philosophers, it is Evidentialism. Presenting a direct challenge to Evidentialism are pragmatic arguments for theism, which are designed to support belief in the absence of adequate evidence. Pascal's Wager is the most prominent theistic pragmatic argument, and issues in epistemology, the ethics of belief, and decision theory, as well as philosophical theology, all intersect at the Wager. This book explores various theistic pragmatic arguments and the objections employed against them. It presents a new version of the Wager, the so-called ‘Jamesian Wager’, and argues that this survives the objections hurled against theistic pragmatic arguments and provides strong support for theistic belief. Objections found in Voltaire, Hume, and Nietzsche against the Wager are scrutinized, as are objections issued by Richard Swinburne, Richard Gale, and other contemporary philosophers. The ethics of belief, the many-gods objection, the problem of infinite utilities, and the propriety of a hope-based acceptance are also examined.

While religious communities often stress the universal nature of their beliefs, it remains true that people choose to worship alongside those they identify with most easily. Multiethnic churches are rare in the United States, but as American attitudes toward diversity change, so too does the appeal of a church that offers diversity. Joining such a community, however, is uncomfortable — worshippers must literally cross the barriers of ethnic difference by entering the religious space of the ethnically “other”. Using the story of one multiethnic congregation in Southern California, this book examines what it means to confront the challenges in forming a religious community across ethnic divisions and attracting a more varied membership.

Democracy used to be seen as a relatively mechanical matter of merely adding up everyone's votes in free and fair elections. That mechanistic model has many virtues, among them allowing democracy to ‘track the truth’, where purely factual issues are all that is at stake. Political disputes invariably mix facts with values, however, and then it is essential to listen to what people are saying rather than merely note how they are voting. The great challenge is how to implement that deliberative ideal among millions of people at once. In this book, Goodin offers a solution: ‘democratic deliberation within’. Building on models of ordinary conversational dynamics, he suggests that people simply imagine themselves in the position of various other people they have heard or read about and ask, ‘What would they say about this proposal’? Informing the democratic imaginary then becomes the key to making deliberations more reflective—more empathetic, more considered, and more expansive across time and distance. After an introductory chapter, the book has eleven further chapters arranged in three sections: Preference Democracy (two chapters); Belief Democracy (four chapters); and Value Democracy (five chapters, including a conclusion).

This book introduces the concept of theistic natural signs. It argues that these signs, the concept of which comes from a modified and expanded account of Reidian natural signs, provide sufficient evidence to support belief in God for at least some people. The book first explains the Reidian account of natural signs and adapts that account to provide the framework for theistic natural signs. The book then argues that theistic natural signs provide the intuitions that undergird many of the cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments for God's existence. Cosmic wonder, beneficial order, perception of the self as a responsible and accountable moral agent, and perception of the value of the human person are four natural signs that the book considers at length. It is argued that theistic natural signs should be consistent with the Pascalian constraints formalized in the Wide Accessibility and Easy Resistibility principles, and that each of the four signs mentioned does meet those standards. While it is not argued that theistic natural signs provide a conclusive proof for God, it is maintained that they do provide significant evidence for anyone whose epistemic stance is sufficient to avoid general skepticism. Even though these natural signs, taken alone, may lead only to a thin theism and do not provide what is necessary for a meaningful faith in God, they do provide important overall support for theism.

It has traditionally been thought that the substitution of co-referential terms succeeds in all but a few special linguistic contexts, such as belief reports. Philosophers have devoted considerable energy to attempting to understand these special contexts. This book discusses apparent cases of substitution failure in simple sentences: those that do not involve any such special contexts. It shows that existing theories — whether semantic or pragmatic — cannot accommodate these cases, and that certain central assumptions regarding the role of intuitions must be abandoned in order to deal with them. The book offers a new explanation of anti-substitution intuitions that builds on empirical data from psychology, and explores the methodological implications of this form of explanation.

Different theologians give different accounts of the kind of faith that is necessary for the practice of a religion such as Christianity. For some it is simply belief that there is a God (and that he has done various actions); for others it is trust in God. This book analyses the nature of belief and trust, and considers when belief and trust are rational. It concludes that the practice of a religion requires a faith which involves both trust and belief, but a fairly weak kind of belief. The book reaches this conclusion by analysing the purposes for practising a religion — the rendering of due worship and obedience to God, and the attainment of salvation for oneself and others. Someone's religious practice is rational in so far as he or she has reason for believing that practising his or her religion is the best way to achieve these purposes, and that these purposes are greatly worthwhile.

Is the point of belief and assertion invariably to think or say something true? Is the truth of a belief or assertion absolute, or is it only relative to human interests? Most philosophers think it incoherent to profess to believe something but not think it true, or to say that some of the things we believe are only relatively true. Common sense disagrees. It sees many opinions, such as those about matters of taste, as neither true nor false; it takes it as obvious that some of the truth is relative. This book argues that when it comes to truth, common sense is right, philosophical orthodoxy wrong. The first half of the book examines connections between the performative aspects of talk (what we do when we speak), our emotions and evaluations, and the conditions under which talk and thought qualifies as true or false. It argues that the performative and expressive sometimes trump the semantic, making truth and falsity the wrong dimension of evaluation for belief or assertion. Among the topics taken up are: racial slurs and other epithets; relations between logic and truth; the status of moral and ethical talk; vagueness, and the liar paradox. The book's second half defends the idea that much of everyday thought and talk is only relatively true or false. Truth is inevitably relative, given that we cannot work out in advance how our concepts will apply to the world. The book explains what it is for truth to be relative, rebuts standard objections to relativism, and argues that relativism is consistent with the idea that one view can be objectively better than another. The book concludes with an account of matters of taste and of how it is possible for divergent views of such matters to be equally valid, even if not true or false.

This book contains thirteen specially written chapters which discuss topics from the work of Bas C. van Fraassen, one of the most important contemporary philosophers of science. The central and unifying theme of the book is empiricism, an approach which van Fraassen developed most fully in The Scientific Image and The Empirical Stance. Thirteen experts examine van Fraassen's defence of scientific anti-realism (which he sees as a core tenet of empiricism), as well as his claim that adopting a philosophical position like empiricism does not consist of holding a particular set of beliefs, but is rather a matter of taking a stance. The book concludes with an extensive and intriguing reply by van Fraassen, in which he develops and corrects his old views, and offers new insights into the nature of science, empiricism, and philosophy itself.

Some of our beliefs are fundamentally about ourselves: these are beliefs about who we are, where we are, and which features we have. Philosophers typically suppose that the contents of our beliefs and other cognitive attitudes are propositions. Propositions are things that might be true or false, and their truth values do not vary from time to time, place to place, or person to person. The main thesis of this book is that this supposition is mistaken and must be replaced with another view about content. The view that belief contents are propositions breaks down in the face of belief about the self, or so-called de se belief. On the view defended here, the content of a de se belief is a property that the believer reflexively takes himself or herself to have. The relation of self-ascription connects believers and such properties. Unlike propositions, properties lack absolute truth values that do not vary with time, place, or person. This book offers a sustained defense of the property theory of content, according to which the content of every cognitive attitude is a property rather than a proposition. The theory is supported with some new arguments, defended from various objections, and applied to some important problems and puzzles in the philosophy of mind.

Cursory allusions to the relation between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are common in philosophical literature, but there has been little in the way of serious and comprehensive commentary on the relationship between their ideas. This book attempts both to close this gap and to offer important independent readings of Kierkegaard's and Wittgenstein's conceptions of philosophy and religious belief. Chapter 1 carefully documents Kierkegaard's influence on Wittgenstein, while Chapters 2 and 3 provide trenchant criticisms of two prominent attempts that have been made to compare the two thinkers — those of D. Z. Phillips and James Conant. Chapter 4 develops Kierkegaard's and Wittgenstein's concerted criticisms of certain standard conception of religious belief, and defends their own positive conception against the common charges of ‘fideism’ and ‘irrationalism’. As well as contributing to the contemporary debate about how to read Kierkegaard's and Wittgenstein's work, this book addresses issues of central concern not only to scholars of Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, but to anyone interested in issues surrounding the philosophy of religion, or the ethical aspects of philosophical practice as such.

This book is an exploration of the relation between knowledge, reasons, and justification. According to the primary argument of the book, you can rely on what you know in action and belief, because what you know can be a reason you have and you can rely on the reasons you have. If knowledge doesn't allow for a chance of error — if it requires certainty — then this result is unsurprising. But if knowledge does allow for a chance of error — as seems required if we know much of anything at all — this result entails the denial of a received position in epistemology. Because any chance of error, if the stakes are high enough, can make a difference to what can be relied on, two subjects with the same evidence and generally the same strength of epistemic position for a proposition can differ with respect to whether they are in a position to know. This phenomenon has come to be known as ‘pragmatic encroachment’. All of the points above, it is argued, apply equally well to justification for believing. The results, then, have ramifications for and are borne on by debates about epistemological externalism and contextualism, the value and importance of knowledge, Wittgensteinian hinge propositions, Bayesianism, and the nature of belief.

Understanding human beings and their distinctive rational and volitional capacities is one of the central tasks of philosophy. The task requires a clear account of such things as reasons, desires, emotions, and motives, and of how they combine to produce and explain human behaviour. Kinds of Reasons offers a fresh and incisive treatment of these issues, focusing in particular on reasons as they feature in contexts of agency. The account offered builds on some important recent work in the area; but it takes its main inspiration from the tradition that receives its seminal contemporary expression in the writings of G. E. M. Anscombe, a tradition that runs counter to the broadly Humean orthodoxy that has dominated the theory of action for the past forty years. The book offers an alternative to the Humean view that our reason for acting are mental states: it explains and develops a distinctive version of the view that our reasons for acting are facts, and defends it against difficulties that have been thought to be insurmountable. In addition, it proposes an account of the relation between reasons and desires, and of the role these play in practical reasoning and in the explanation of action.

This book analyzes the concept of theological incorrectness, namely, why people believe what they shouldn’t? It takes off from Justin Barrett’s notion of “theological correctness”, which contends that while religious believers produce theologically correct ideas in situations that allow them the time and space to reflect symmetrically on their beliefs, the same people can stray from those ideological beliefs in situations that require them to solve problems rapidly. It also puts forward a cognitive approach to studying religion.

This ethnography details the UFO religion, Unarius Academy of Science, and their belief system, which includes visions, channeling, dreams, myths, healing, past-life therapy, and recovered memories. From the theoretical perspective of the social construction of reality, it analyzes the way members create their own social world of contact with extraterrestrials. Based on lengthy field research, the everyday life and history of one of America’s oldest contactee groups is described. The text explicates the lives of the founders, Ernest and Ruth Norman, who claimed to be Space Brothers from higher realms of knowledge that offer a celestial science to Earth. Max Weber’s theory of charisma is used to analyze Ruth Norman, who led the group as Uriel the Archangel, Goddess of Love. Since Unarius had a failed millennial prophecy of spaceships landing in 2001, the author compares them to the group Leon Festinger studied in the 1950s. In looking at the interpretive methods Unarius used to explain success rather than failure, the text discusses the reasons why prophecies rarely fail in the eyes of believers.

This book addresses two central questions in epistemology: (1) which beliefs are epistemologically basic (i.e., noninferentially justified)? and (2) where does perception end and inferential cognition begin? The book offers a highly externalist theory, arguing that it is not introspectible features of the beliefs that determine their status as basic or as perceptual; instead, these are determined by the nature of the cognitive system, or module, that produced the beliefs. On this view, the sensory experiences that typically accompany perceptual beliefs play no indispensable role in the justification of these beliefs, and one can have perceptual beliefs—justified perceptual beliefs—even in the absence of any sensory experiences whatsoever. The book develops a general theory of basic beliefs and argues that perceptual beliefs are a species of basic beliefs. This results from the fact that perceptual modules are a special type of basic-belief-producing modules. Importantly, some beliefs are not the outputs of this class of cognitive module; these beliefs are nonbasic, thus requiring evidential support from other beliefs for their justification. This last point is used to defend a reliabilist epistemology against an important class of traditional objections (where the agent uses a reliable process that she doesn't know to be reliable). The overarching view defended in the book is a type of reliabilism, and the basic/nonbasic distinction developed here offers a version of reliabilism that takes inference seriously yet remains staunchly externalist.

The religious ambiguity of the world has many aspects, one of which is the hiddenness of God. Theists have proposed a number of explanations of God's hiddenness. Some putative explanations contend that the advantages of God's hiddenness (“goods of mystery”) outweigh whatever benefits would result if God's existence and nature were clear to us (“goods of clarity”). Goods of mystery that have received a lot of discussion include human moral autonomy and the ability on our part to exercise control over whether we believe in the existence of God. The extent of the ambiguity that surrounds God's existence, and indeed all important religious matters, combined with our lack of an obviously correct and adequate explanation of this lack, suggest that, even if God exists, it is not important that people believe in God. Another central theme in the book is the significance of religious diversity for religious belief. The character of this diversity is such that it provides people who take a position on religious matters with reason to adopt the “Critical Stance” – which requires people in all the religious traditions to subject their religious beliefs to critical scrutiny and hold those beliefs in a tentative way.Some contend that religious faith requires complete confidence in what is believed but tentative belief actually is sufficient to sustain many forms of religious commitment.