Abstract
Religious believers are often criticized on the grounds that their beliefs are not based on evidence or are based on insufficient evidence. I want to try to see whether that is a fair criticism. Following Alvin Plantinga,1 we can call it ‘the evidentialist objection’ to religious belief.2
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Notes
Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (eds.), Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), p. 17.
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), p. 816.
W. K. Clifford, Lectures and Essays, ed. by Leslie Stephen and Frederick Pollack (New York: Macmillan and Company, 1901), Vol. II, pp. 186.
John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (London: Macmillan Press, 1989), p. 73.
Basil Mitchell. The Justification of Religious Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), p. 34. In fairness, I should point out that the quotation just cited does not represent Kant’s final position on this issue.
Peter van Inwagen makes this point in his ‘Quam Dilecta,’ in Thomas V. Morris, God and the Philosophers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 42–46.
William James, The Will To Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), p. 3. James’ overall argument in ‘The Will To Believe’ is analysed in some detail in Part II of Faith, Skepticism, and Evidence.
Is there an additional duty in such cases actively to seek out so far unknown evidence? Perhaps not — or perhaps only in cases where there is good reason to think that there is additional evidence to be had and that it will increase your chances of getting things right. See Richard Feldman, ‘The Ethics of Belief,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. LX, No 3 ((May, 2000), pp. 689–690.
See Stephen Wykstra, ‘Toward a Sensible Evidentialism: On the Notion of ‘Needing Evidence’,’ in Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, 2nd. ed., ed. by William Rowe and William Wainwright (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989).
John Hick, ‘Religious Faith as Experiencing-As,’ in Philosophy of Religion, ed. by N. O. Schedler (NY; Macmillan, 1974), p 28.
See his, ‘Is God an Unnecessary Hypothesis?,’ Andrew Dole and Andrew Chignell (eds.), God and the Ethics of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 143.
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© 2012 Stephen T. Davis
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Davis, S.T. (2012). Faith, Evidence, and Evidentialism. In: Sugirtharajah, S. (eds) Religious Pluralism and the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230360136_15
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