Resolving Religious Disagreements

Abstract

Resolving religious disagreements is difficult, for beliefs about religion tend to come with strong biases against other views and the people who hold them. Evidence can help, but there is no agreed-upon policy for weighting it, and moreover bias affects the content of our evidence itself. Another complicating factor is that some biases are reliable and others unreliable. What we need is an evidence-weighting policy geared toward negotiating the effects of bias. I consider three evidence-weighting policies in the philosophy of religion and advocate one of them as the best for promoting the resolution of religious disagreements.

Agnosticism I: Language, perspectives and evidence

“…Those who reject agnosticism as the answer to peer disagreement revert Kenny's reasoning, noting that private evidence may be valuable and lead to truth. For instance, Katherine Dormandy argues that, since suspending judgement guarantees not having any true beliefs on the matter, the policy of taking into account only the evidence available to all peers is epistemically problematic (see Dormandy, 2018, pp. 70–72; cf.…”

The epistemic benefits of religious disagreement

“…A core concern of religious epistemology is epistemically 'central' religious beliefs, such as 'God exists'. But this narrow focus ignores the array of other elements of a belief system, including more peripheral beliefs and things other than beliefs, that can be fruitfully disagreed over (Dormandy, 2018b). No wonder, then, that committed believers might be wary of religious disagreement.…”

“…Given a single set of symptoms, a cardiologist may be biased towards cardiological explanations whereas an endocrinologist may favour endocrinological ones, but the real explanation may be nutritional. So even truth-sensitive psychological and sociological influences are prone to generating certain sorts of false belief even as they promote other true ones; I will call a belief brought about by an otherwise truth-sensitive influence a false-positive belief (Dormandy (2018b), 60).…”

Does Epistemic Humility Threaten Religious Beliefs?

“…Or a religious believer who, we will suppose rightly, believes that sin has noetic outworkings may, we will suppose wrongly, evaluate an atheist’s objections as being weaker than they are, because she unconsciously epistemically downgrades the atheist himself. 5 We may call false beliefs resulting from the influence of an overall true worldview false-positive beliefs (Dormandy, 2018a, p. 60). Dogmatic-but-true religious believers have a strong tendency to form false-positive beliefs, which in their turn become additional one-sided evidence that helps generate even more false-positive beliefs.…”

“… 2. I argue elsewhere that Plantinga’s Reformed epistemology legitimates dogmatic belief in this way (Dormandy 2018a, pp. 73–75). …”