J. L. Schellenberg

In this paper I distinguish two levels of intellectual importance, derived and underived, showing how the former can be species-based. Then I do four things: first, identify a neglected way, stemming from perceived human intellectual maturity, in which many of us are vulnerable to a sense of species-based importance; second, show—in part by appealing to facts about deep time—that we have no right to this sense and so evince a failure of intellectual humility if we acquiesce in it; third, defend the view that the claims of intellectual humility on those who would be overall rational are not in this regard overridden; and then, finally, gesture at some of the consequences of this result for inquiry.

In this paper I argue that moral virtue is sometimes causally necessary both for theistic belief and for nonbelief. I then argue for some further connectionsbetween these results and the Calvinist view, recently revived in the philosophy of religion, according to which theistic belief is typically warranted and all those who dissent from such belief persist in their nonbelief because of sin. Specifically, I maintain that the virtue of belief militates against its being warranted, and that the virtue of nonbelief renders the Calvinist generalization concerning nonbelief and sin implausible.

In this paper I argue that given the present state of relevant inquiry, the facts of religious diversity justify religious skepticism. Because of the diversity of religious claims, the denial of any detailed religious proposition is equivalent to a large disjunction of alternative claims. The same is true of the denial of metaphysical naturalism. And having typically acquired no detailed understanding of the whole panoply of religious views, religious believers and metaphysical naturalists are rarely in a position to judge, of any such disjunction, how likely it is to be true. Now the investigative deficit here might conceivably be oversome, but the paper concludes by showing that even where it is overcome, we remain in conditions supporting religious skepticism because of the evolutionary immaturity of our species, which prevents us from being in a position to judge whether religious diversity as humans in the future – or some future species – will know it includes ideas about the Divine trumping any contrary ideas of today.