Religious Belief II

Abstract

Abstract This chapter evaluates William Alston’s view that putative perceptions of God can provide justification for certain beliefs about God (15.1). Notwithstanding agreement with some key features of Alston’s brilliantly original proposal—such as the rejection of epistemic double standards and of epistemic imperialism—it is objected that a Christian doxastic practice built on the direct perception of God faces difficulties arising from both its own internal overrider system (starting with the statement in John 1:18 that ‘no one has ever seen God’) and from independent philosophical reasons (notably the Kantian insistence on an ontological and therefore epistemological gap between human beings and any putative noumenal entity not bounded by space and time: 15.2). The chapter ends (15.3) with the proposal of an alternative framework for religious epistemology in which the model of cognition defended in this book is applied. A distinctive feature of religion is that of being primarily about matters in which the kind of direct cognitive contact required by knowledge is not available, at least as regards our natural cognitive abilities. When the object of cognition is some putative supernatural, noumenal entity, the appropriate cognitive model is belief rather than knowledge. Although some things may be known also in the domain of religion, the specific epistemic status of what, in religion, is held by faith is belief, not knowledge. Nevertheless, to be rationally held, religious belief (as any other belief) also needs reasons, including reasons of an epistemic kind.