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Large numbers of people have religious experiences in the sense of experiences which seem to them to be experiences of God. It is a basic epistemological principle, the principle of credulity, that — in absence of counter-evidence — we should believe that things are as they seem to be. The only kind of counter-evidence which would tend to show a religious experience not to be veridical would be any evidence tending to show that there is no God. In the absence of any such evidence, any religious experience is evidence for the subject (and via his testimony, for others) of the existence of God.

Chapter 6 concludes that the natural signs of God provide prima facie evidence of God's existence and even, for people in some epistemic positions, makes belief in God reasonable. While the signs are not conclusive for all people and fall short of the kind of belief needed for a robust theism, they can still serve to discomfort the dogmatic naturalist and bolster the uncertain believer. Toward this conclusion, the chapter argues for the reasonableness of the Pascalian constraints present in the Wide Accessibility and Easy Resistibility principles, as contrasted with the rival perspective implicit in the work of John Schellenberg. It also rebuts a Kantian objection to the natural signs, and argues that any epistemological stance (whether internalist or externalist) sufficient to avoid general skepticism is also sufficient to make a strong case that the natural signs for God do provide genuine evidence for God's reality.

Imagination is often associated with the capacity to contemplate non-existent possibilities; however imaginative faculty is also used when thinking about several non-observable but real events that are learned through testimony rather than direct observation. This chapter discusses the relation ship between imagination and testimony in the cognitive development of children. Testimony is the manner with which adults impart information to the younger members of the society. Through testimony, children gain insight into events that they are not able to observe firsthand. And just as children process a fictional narrative through imagination, they also rely on imagination to make sense of real events that they have not witnessed for themselves. To test the interweaving relationship of testimony and imagination, an experimental study testing the credulity of children on matters they cannot verify themselves was conducted. Evidence has shown that even preschool children do not readily believe what they are told and often measure this information with concepts and constructs they have devised for themselves. They are also cautious in their trust, wherein they often seek out and endorse information from reliable informants. They are also capable of showing differentiation among different types of non-observable entities. They exhibit more credence in invisible scientific entities and less credence in non-scientific entities.

If we ignore religious experience, there is enough evidence considered in this book, to make the existence of God as probable as not. Theism is a simple hypothesis which leads us to expect many phenomena which are not otherwise to be expected. The principle of credulity considered in Chapter 13 has the consequence that we ought to believe that what we appear to experience is really there unless there is considerable counter-evidence. Hence, the religious experience (of ourselves or others) when added to the other evidence makes it probable on balance that there is a God.

This chapter explores the analogy proposed by Thomas Reid between testimony and sense perception. It begins by trying to arrive at a correct understanding of the two principles he identifies as fundamental to our acquiring information from others: the principles of veracity and credulity. Next, it investigates the similarities Reid finds between perception and testimony considered as mechanisms of belief formation. Finally, it investigates whether the analogy between perception and testimony can be extended from psychology into epistemology. In particular, it discusses whether beliefs based on testimony, like beliefs based on sense perception, may be regarded as epistemologically basic or foundational. It concludes that although Reid's answer is yes (testimonial fundamentalism), the correct answer is no (testimonial reductionism).

This chapter defends the ‘extendedness hypothesis,’ according to which the process by which testimonial beliefs are formed is interpersonal in extent, against a variety of objections. In the course of this discussion, various matters are addressed, including the relationship between the extendedness hypothesis and the “extended mind” hypothesis in the philosophy of mind, the conditions on doxastic justification for belief‐dependent processes, the nature of the vice of credulity, and the causal antecedents of testimonial belief.

The chapter examines Chaucer’s fascination with the ethical antithesis between credulity and visionary prudence, together with complex attendant genderings. In the Miller’s Tale, the human power to match the sweep of providence is queried through the problem of escaping from unpredictable floods. The tale mischievously mocks a peasant’s credulousness, his wife’s instinctuality, and a student’s pretension to prudential foresight. In the Merchant’s Tale credulity, arrogant imperviousness, and lust are more tartly explored as impediments to human vision. That the scales eventually drop from January’s physical sight correlates wittily with a Stoic idea that the cataract of ethical ignorance has to be removed to acquire mental vision. But it is in the Wife of Bath’s Tale that male vision is more productively improved, when an old woman becomes an instrument of moral enlightenment, bidding her knight-husband to ‘cast up the curtain’ and see ‘how it is’.

To be justified, a belief must be ‘based’ on its grounds. For an externalist, being based on grounds is being ‘caused’ by these grounds (by a non‐deviant route). For an internalist (normally), a belief is said to be based on basic beliefs. But then, the believer would need to believe that his belief is caused and/or rendered probable by the basic beliefs; and then maybe actual causing is not even necessary. Further, basic beliefs need to be understood rather as basic propositions that come to the believer with different degrees of prior probability, which measure their initial strengths—only some of these are sufficiently strong to form beliefs. Some actual basic propositions are, for a priori reasons, not rightly basic (e.g. because they are beliefs in a logically impossible proposition). But in general (following the Principle of Credulity), a basic proposition, of whatever strength, is (to that strength) rightly basic.

An analysis of three problems for Richard Swinburne’s Bayesian cumulative case strategy in natural theology shows why he needs to shift the burden of proof to the unbeliever. Allegedly, this shift is accomplished by the argument from religious experience, which is based upon the Principle of Credulity and the Principle of Testimony. However, the Principle of Credulity does not apply to religious experiences, and genuine perceptual of-God experiences are impossible. Furthermore, if monotheism were true, most religious experiences (of other gods than God) would be deceptive, so that religious experience in general would be highly unreliable. Swinburne does not succeed to neutralize other defeaters of the argument from religious experience either, so that one cannot shift the burden of proof to unbelievers. It is concluded that Swinburne’s cumulative case for the existence of God fails, and that it is unlikely that anyone else will succeed in arguing convincingly that God exists.

When faced with two informants making conflicting claims, preschool children display two heuristics: (1) they preferentially seek and endorse information from the informant with whom they have a stronger social connection, and (2) they preferentially seek and endorse information from the informant who has been more accurate in the past. When these two heuristics are placed in competition with one another, for example, when children encounter a familiar informant who has been inaccurate and an unfamiliar informant who has been accurate, younger preschoolers (3-year-olds) seek and endorse information from the more familiar informant whereas older preschoolers (5-year-olds) seek and endorse information from the more accurate informant. Preschoolers’ growing sensitivity to accuracy can be plausibly interpreted as a metacognitive inference: they regard an informant who provides accurate answers as knowledgeable and hence likely to supply trustworthy information in the future. Nevertheless, more research is needed to establish how far children think of informants as contributing in a more or less trustworthy fashion to their own knowledge base.

This chapter defends certain principles of internalist epistemic justification, necessary for establishing the theses of the book. It defends the principle of credulity (that—in the absence of defeaters—how things seem to us, including how we seem to remember things, is probably how things are) and the principle of testimony (that—in the absence of defeaters—what other people tell us is probably true). Any evidence that the way things seem or what people tell us not caused ultimately by the things apparently perceived or testified to provides such a defeater. The chapter applies these principles to showing how we determine the logical modality of sentences, and goes on to analyse how what we learn from experience and testimony makes scientific theories probable to different degrees.

This book has argued that moral obligations are best explained as God's commands. However, if God does not exist, someone might regard this argument as a reductio of moral realism, giving reasons to embrace an error theory. Hence to complete the argument reasons to accept moral realism and reject error theory must be provided. One argument for moral realism is linked to moral experience and the principle of credulity, which holds that experience generally provides prima facie evidence for the reality of what is experienced. Further arguments are provided by Thomas Reid, who tries to show that the first principles of morality are among the deliverances of “common sense.” David Enoch's work updates this type of argument by showing how a commitment to normative realism is presupposed by practical deliberation. Ultimately, moral realism without moral knowledge would be useless and even paradoxical, so the chapter ends with a defense of conscience and the claim that moral intuitions are a source of moral knowledge. A moderate intuitionism is argued to be compatible with evolutionary theory as an account of how moral knowledge is possible.

This chapter reviews studies on children's credulity. It shows that while children have a well-deserved reputation of believing whatever adults tell them, the depth and resilience of their trust in testimony is surprising. A robust bias ensures that they will be able to take advantage of their culture's accumulated knowledge and expertise, much of it transmitted through spoken language. Characterizing this bias represents a first step toward understanding why it can be so difficult for children (and adults) to achieve a healthy balance between belief and skepticism.

This chapter draws all of the threads of the book together and insists that the story of Prince Rupert's ‘necromantic dogge’ should not be dismissed as mere drollery: as an amusing but essentially trivial side-show. Instead, it argues, that story has much wider ramifications, not only alerting us to the sheer cunning and skill with which both Royalist and Parliamentarian propagandists strove to exploit popular witch-belief in support of their own causes, but also providing us with a wholly new perspective on the ways in which popular and elite ideas about politics, religion and the supernatural converged and reacted with each other during the 1640s. [105 words]