Permissible Faith Ventures

Abstract

Debates in religious epistemology have grown stale and the dialectic predictable. Certainly, some debates have assumed greater prominence and generated an interesting body of literature (e.g., the literature on divine hiddenness and skeptical theism). But the positions in the field have hardened. Like all other areas in philosophy, it occasionally takes an iconoclast to shake things up and breathe new life into moribund debates. John Bishop reinvigorates the field and hopefully redirects the debates with his recent book, Believing by Faith: An Essay on the Epistemology and the Ethics of Religious Belief. Bishop displays the care, rigor, and creativity those familiar with his work in the philosophy of action and the philosophy of religion have come to expect from him. What he offers is a wellcrafted development and defense of a modest fideism that takes believing and acting on beliefs in evidentially ambiguous circumstances to be epistemically and morally justified. Believing by Faith consists of a preface and nine chapters. But it can be divided into roughly three sections. Chapters one through four constitute prolegomena to the remaining chapters of the book in which Bishop develops and defends his own positive modest fideist account of the justifiability of holding and acting on what he calls ‘faith beliefs’ (i.e., existentially significant beliefs, practical commitment to which is a matter of choice, and are either framing principles of a doxastic framework or presuppose such a framing principle). In chapters five through seven, Bishop presents and refines his own account, which he christens ‘modest supraevidential fideism’ (p. 174)—a theory inspired by the work of William James (but not a theory that slavishly parrots James). Finally, chapters eight and nine are devoted to considering the case that can be made for his modest fideist religious epistemology. SOPHIA (2009) 48:85–90 DOI 10.1007/s11841-008-0082-3