The Problem of Epistemic Disagreement in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion Part I

Abstract

In this article I focus on the problem of religious disagreement – whether one should lose one’s confidence in his or her religious beliefs in the face of signific­ant disagreement on certain religious issues. The article consists of two large parts. In the first one, the author describes the main categories of the epistemo­logy of disagreement in the focus of religious disagreement (first-order and higher-level significance of evidences in disagreement, fundamental and super­ficial disagreements, and describes the conciliatory approach to the problem within which the question of religious disagreement is usually stated). In the second part the author describes three contemporary projects of philosophical theology (Richard Swinburne’s, Alvin Plantinga’s, and William Alston’s) and analyses how they respond to the problem of religious disagreement. It is shown  that in the case of religious disagreement one cannot successfully apply the con­ciliatory approach, which says that religious person should reduce his or her con­fidence in the truth of the religious beliefs he or she holds. The author draws this conclusion relying on two intuitions: 1) we may distinguish between internal (within one belief system, hypothesis, theory) and external (collisions of belief systems, hypotheses, theories with other, competing belief systems, hypotheses and theories) epistemic disagreements; 2) epistemic disagreements are normal for some human intellectual activities, and rather their absence is abnormal and can sometimes lead to undesirable consequences.