J. L. Schellenberg

William Alston's Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience is a most significant contribution to the philosophy of religion. The product of 50 years' reflection on its topic , this work provides a very thorough explication and defence of what Alston calls the ‘mystical perceptual practice’ – the practice of forming beliefs about the Ultimate on the basis of putative ‘direct experiential awareness’ thereof . Alston argues, in particular, for the rationality of engaging in the Christian form of MP . On his view, those who participate in CMP are justified in forming beliefs as they do because their practice is ‘socially established’, has a ‘functioning overrider system’ and a ‘significant degree of self-support’; and because of the ‘lack of sufficient reasons to take the practice as unreliable’

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 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.

Mark McCreary has argued that I cannot consistently advance both the hiddenness argument and certain arguments for religious scepticism found in my book The Wisdom to Doubt . This reaction was expected, and in WD I explained its shortsightedness in that context. First, I noted how in Part III of WD , where theism is addressed, my principal aim is not to prove atheism but to show theists that they are not immune from the scepticism defended in Parts I and II. To the success of this aim, McCreary's arguments are not so much as relevant, for a thoroughgoing scepticism embracing even the hiddenness argument is quite compatible with its success. But I also explained how someone convinced that the hiddenness argument does prove atheism escapes the grip of religious scepticism because of that argument's reliance on apparent conceptual truths. McCreary's critique obscures this point but does not defuse it.

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.

This paper begins by surveying some of the problems facing Swinburne 's general approach, finding unfortunate the absence from his tetralogy of a strategy that might have helped to alleviate them, namely an attempt to show that a traditional Christian creed is more probable than the creed of any other religion. It then discusses certain particular arguments of the tetralogy – arguments offered in defence of the traditional Christian doctrine of the Atonement – which are central to the detailed working out of the approach, concluding that they are unacceptable

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.

This book is animated by a shared conviction that philosophy of religion needs to change: thirteen new essays suggest why and how. The first part of the volume explores possible changes to the focus of the field. The second part focuses on the standpoint from which philosophers of religion should approach their field. In the first part are chapters on how an emphasis on faith distorts attempts to engage non-western religious ideas; on how philosophers from different traditions might collaborate on common interests; on why the common presupposition of ultimacy leads to error; on how new religious movements feed a naturalistic philosophy of religion; on why a focus on belief and a focus on practice are both mistaken; on why philosophy's deep axiological concern should set much of the field's agenda; and on how the field might contribute to religious evolution. The second part includes a qualitative analysis of the standpoint of fifty-one philosophers of religion, and also addresses issues about humility needed in continental philosophy of religion; about the implausibility of claiming that one's own worldview is uniquely rational; about the Moorean approach to religious epistemology; about a Spinozan middle way between 'insider' and 'outsider' perspectives; and about the unorthodox lessons we could learn from scriptures like the book of Job if we could get past the confessional turn in recent philosophy of religion.The goal of the volume is to identify new paths for philosophers of religion that are distinct from those travelled by theologians and other scholars of religion.

"There is no attempt here to lay down as inviolable or to legislate certain ways of looking at things or ways of proceeding for philosophers of religion, only proposals for how to deal with a range of basic issues-proposals that I hope will ignite much fruitful discussion and which, in any case, I shall take as a basis for my own ongoing work in the field."-from the Preface Providing an original and systematic treatment of foundational issues in philosophy of religion, J. L. Schellenberg's new book addresses the structure of religious and irreligious belief, the varieties of religious skepticism, and the nature of religion itself. From the author's searching analysis of faith emerges a novel understanding of propositional faith as requiring the absence of belief. Schellenberg asks what the aims of the field should be, setting out a series of principles for carrying out some of the most important of these aims. His account of justification considers not only belief but also other responses to religious claims and distinguishes the justification of responses, propositions, and persons. Throughout Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion, Schellenberg is laying the groundwork for an elaboration of his own vision while at the same time suggesting how philosophers might rethink assumptions guiding most of today's work in analytic philosophy of religion.

I seek to promote a fuller understanding of religious skepticism by defending five theses. These concern, respectively: its breadth, discussed in relation to theism on the one hand and naturalism on the other; why it should be distinguished from a general metaphysical skepticism; how it is supported by the consequences of recent cultural evolution, which at the same time enable new and stronger arguments for atheism; the relations it bears to non-doxastic religious faith; and, finally, its curious capacity in certain not uncommon circumstances to take the form of a soft irreligion that is widely approvable—even from a religious perspective.

The aim of this book, reflected in its title, is to clarify the theist's conception of God while supporting skepticism with respect to its instantiation. The first half of this task is carried out through an investigation of atheological arguments. These are arguments that seek to deduce a contradiction from properties traditionally ascribed to God--omnipotence, absoluteness, immutability, timelessness, benevolence, and so on--with the help of only necessarily true additional premises. Arguments of this sort, Gale claims, are "thought experiments that probe the internal consistency of the theist's conception of God, often with the result that the theist must go back to the drawing board and redesign the particular divine attribute that is the focus of the argument". This, however, is a good result, according to Gale, for, as he attempts to show, the traditional conception entails that God is a "nonperson" and is religiously unavailable.