J. L. Schellenberg

In this paper I develop a new recipe for solving the problem of religious disagreement suggested by the injunction to cultivate intellectual humility conjoined with awareness of human immaturity in deep time. The ingredients brought to the table include such things as noticing the full breadth and texture of the religious propositional field, observing the previously hidden areas of agreement this exposes, making a differential judgment of importance in relation to religious propositions, applying the concept of a position, and finding a better home for an emphasis on detailed beliefs than contexts of inquiry can provide. Special attention is given to the modesty of the proposal, which asks relatively little of religious practitioners while reconceiving this area of discussion.

In many places and times, and for many people, God's existence has been rather less than a clear fact. According to the hiddenness argument, this is actually a reason to suppose that it is not a fact at all. The hiddenness argument is a new argument for atheism that has come to prominence in philosophy over the past two decades. J. L. Schellenberg first developed the argument in 1993, and this book offers a short and vigorous statement of its central claims and ideas. Logically sharp but so clear that anyone can understand, the book addresses little-discussed issues such as why it took so long for hiddenness reasoning to emerge in philosophy, and how the hiddenness problem is distinct from the problem of evil. It concludes with the fascinating thought that retiring the last of the personal gods might leave us nearer the beginning of religion than the end.

In this paper I discuss a neglected form of argument against religious belief -- generically, 'the probabilistic argument from pluralism'. If the denial of a belief is equivalent to the disjunction of its alternatives, and if we may gain some idea as to the probabilities of such disjunctions by adding the separate probabilities of their mutually exclusive disjuncts, and if, moreover, the denials of many religious beliefs are disjunctions known to have two or more mutually exclusive members each possessing a significant degree or probability, then at any rate in many such cases, the denial of a religious belief can be shown to be more probable than it is -- which is to say that the belief can be shown to be improbable. I consider a large number of responses to arguments of this form, concluding that none suffices to overthrow it altogether. Indeed, the argument remains as a significant threat to any religious belief confronted by a plurality of alternatives