Theology and Rationality: Some Conceptual and Epistemic Remarks

Abstract

Abstract: The paper comprises three major arguments and, correspondingly, three main objectives. First, it suggests that we conceive of rationality as a virtue-concept designating, among other things, an entity located halfway between virtues that admit being reformulated as goods and duties (like reliability) and those lacking this capacity (like wisdom, being a good and a virtue, but not a duty). Second, the notion of “epistemic success” is introduced in order to account for possible standards of rationality—if only in the restricted sense of a sufficient condition of rationality, as opposed to a necessary one. Finally, religious beliefs as well as their self-reflective expression as theological statements) are shown, at least in principal, to be epistemically successful and thus rationally justified in the pragmatical sense described: if, whenever and to the extent that they express and are rooted in certain experiences to be spelled out as an “acute spiritual crisis.” Moreover, such justification turns out to have a special bearing on how dogmatically adequate statements can be generated.