Wilson Sugeng

Distinguishing between sane religious beliefs and delusions is conceptually difficult, as both can exhibit epistemic features such as resistance to widely accepted counter-evidence. This paper challenges three existing approaches to this distinction before proposing a fourth alternative, while exploring its implications for the epistemology of religion debates on evidentialism, fideism, and Reformed epistemology. The first approach argues that delusions are not sincere beliefs while religious beliefs are. The second, evidentialist approach, claims that delusions are not evidence-responsive, while religious beliefs are. However, this risks cultural chauvinism by privileging one tradition’s evidence-responsiveness over another’s. The third, fideist approach, distinguishes delusions as pathological or culturally unacceptable, unlike religious beliefs, collapsing into over-relativism. The fourth, warrant-based approach adapted from Reformed epistemology, resolves these issues by distinguishing delusions as unwarranted due to their being caused by cognitive malfunction, while granting warrant to religious beliefs formed under reliable faculties and aimed at truth. This method provides a culturally sensitive yet objective framework.

Yujin Nagasawa’s problem of systemic evil (pose) argues that systemic evils like natural se lection pose a greater challenge to atheism/non-theism than to theism, as they conflict with “modest optimism”: the view that the world is fundamentally “not bad.” Nagasawa suggests theism resolves this by appealing to a heavenly bliss, offsetting natural evils, a strategy unavailable to atheists/non-theists. However, I argue that atheists/non-theists are better equipped to address pose because they are not constrained by the theistic commitment to a categorically good world. In Section 1, I critique two theistic approaches to pose. Extreme optimism defends the actual world as the best possible one, requiring problematic justifications such as free-will and “only way” theodicies to explain systemic evils as necessary. Neutral optimism, while allowing for multiple good worlds, still struggles to reconcile systemic evils with a benevolent God, merely shifting the problem to other possible worlds. In Section 2, I explore how atheists/non-theists can bypass pose. They can adopt personal, rather than cosmic, optimism, valuing their own existence without affirming the world’s overall goodness. Alternatively, they can embrace comparative optimism, viewing existence as better than non-existence without attributing intrinsic value to natural processes like evolution. These flexible approaches free non-theists from the philosophical burdens tied to systemic evils. In Section 3, I argue that even if pose persists, atheists/non-theists can “borrow” theists’ theodicies without committing to their metaphysical assumptions. By adopting naturalistic or subjective frameworks, non-theists can justify their modest optimism without the theological constraints imposed by theism. This demonstrates that pose ultimately challenges theistic frameworks more than atheistic ones.