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Epistemic Issues in Non-classical Religious Belief

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A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444). This special issue belongs to the section "Religions and Humanities/Philosophies".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (25 May 2022) | Viewed by 53894

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Dr. Hans Van Eyghen

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Tilburg School of Catholic Theology, Tilburg University, 5037 AB Tilburg, The Netherlands
Interests: analytical philosophy; philosophy of psychology; philosophy of religion; philosophy of cognitive science; epistemology

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We kindly invite you to submit proposals for a Special Issue on ‘The Epistemology of non-classical religious belief’.

The aim of this issue is to address the epistemic status of various non-classical religious beliefs. Contemporary philosophy of religion includes an active and venerable tradition of arguments concerning the epistemic status of religious belief. While some new approaches address the rationality of ritual practices, the vast majority addresses the epistemic status of belief in God. Very often authors define ‘God’ as a perfect being; a supernatural being that has the greatest possible number of perfections (omniscience, omnibenevolence, necessity, omni-presence, etc.). This concept of God is often labeled as ‘classical theism’.

While defining ‘God’ as a perfect being is fairly common in Abrahamic religious traditions, it is far less so in non-western traditions. In Indian religions, Gods are bound by karma and therefore not omnipotent. In Yoruba-based traditions, oshun are sometimes regarded as localized and therefore not omni-present. Many adherents of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism also hold beliefs on ‘intermediary’ supernatural beings that lack perfection, such as angels, demons, and Jinn.

Belief in non-perfect beings is less supported by arguments from natural theology. Furthermore, non-perfect beings lack the ability to directly intervene in the inner workings of the human cognitive apparatus or the genesis thereof. Therefore, non-classical religious belief raises new epistemological questions.

This issue welcomes contributions that to investigate epistemic questions concerning other religious beliefs than belief in a perfect being. Both arguments in favor of or against a positive epistemic status for non-classical theistic belief are welcomed. Papers discussing reasons for why subjects hold various non-classical theistic beliefs are also welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

Can belief in angels, spirits, or demons be regarded as rational?
How does the assessment of the rationality of non-perfect supernatural beings differ from that of perfect supernatural beings?
Do experiences of non-perfect supernatural beings suffice for rational belief in their existence?
Can belief in spirits or other non-perfect supernatural beings be reconciled with contemporary science (physics)?
Does contemporary cognitive science or psychology provide debunking or undermining explanations for belief in spirits or demons?

Dr. Hans Van Eyghen
Guest Editor

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Keywords

religious belief
religious epistemology
spirit belief
non-western religion

Published Papers (12 papers)

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Research

20 pages, 346 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Afro-Brazilian Religions and the Prospects for a Philosophy of Religious Practice

by José Eduardo Porcher and Fernando Carlucci

Religions 2023, 14(2), 146; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rel14020146 - 26 Jan 2023

Viewed by 2115

Abstract

In this paper, we take our cue from Kevin Schilbrack’s admonishment that the philosophy of religion needs to take religious practices seriously as an object of investigation. We do so by offering Afro-Brazilian traditions as an example of the methodological poverty of current philosophical engagement with religions that are not text-based, belief-focused, and institutionalized. Anthropologists have studied these primarily orally transmitted traditions for nearly a century. Still, they involve practices, such as offering and sacrifice as well as spirit possession and mediumship, that have yet to receive attention from philosophers. We argue that this is not an accident: philosophers have had a highly restricted diet of examples, have not looked at ethnography as source material, and thus still need to put together a methodology to tackle such practices. After elucidating Schilbrack’s suggestions to adopt an embodiment paradigm and apply conceptual metaphor theory and the extended mind thesis to consider religious practices as thoughtful, we offer criticism of the specifics of his threefold solution. First, it assumes language is linear; second, it takes a problematic view of the body; and third, it abides by a misleading view of the “levels” of cognition. We conclude that the philosophy of religion should adopt enactivism to understand religious practices as cognitive enterprises. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Epistemic Issues in Non-classical Religious Belief)

17 pages, 306 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Hypostasis of the Archons: Platonic Forms as Angels

by Marcus William Hunt

Religions 2023, 14(1), 114; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rel14010114 - 13 Jan 2023

Viewed by 2781

Abstract

The thesis of this paper is that Platonic Forms are angels. I make this identification by claiming that Platonic Forms have the characteristics of angels, in particular, that Platonic Forms are alive. I offer four arguments for this claim. First, it seems that engaging in self-directed action is a sufficient condition for being alive. The Forms are, as teleological activities, self-directed actions. Second, bodies receive their being from their Forms, and some bodies are essentially alive. Third, in the Good, all the types of goodness, including life, are identical. The Forms are appearances of the Good. Fourth, since the Good imparts as much goodness as it can, the Forms are alive unless there is some bar to their being alive. There are good reasons to think that there is no such bar. I then show that ethical vices do not give body to human form, but give body to other forms—those that are evil angels. Lastly, I provide a survey of the relationships that various religious traditions posit between ethical vice and the demonic. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Epistemic Issues in Non-classical Religious Belief)

14 pages, 320 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Belief in Karma: The Belief-Inducing Power of a Collection of Ideas and Practices with a Long History

by Tommi Lehtonen

Religions 2023, 14(1), 52; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rel14010052 - 28 Dec 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 8244

Abstract

This article provides an analysis of the concept of karma and related concepts, such as rebirth, merit, and transfer of merit, along with a historical survey focusing on classical texts. The attractiveness of the belief in karma lies in two main reasons. The first is the moral ideal of getting one’s just deserts on the basis of one’s actions and omissions. The second reason involves the idea of rebirth. The belief in both karma and rebirth can bring consolation with the hope of life hereafter, where one’s destiny is determined not by chance, but by the moral quality of one’s actions in this or previous lives. The belief in karma also incorporates diverging elements, such as transfer of merit. The practice of transfer of merit serves to improve an individual’s moral and religious status through rituals or other suitable means, while the doctrine of karma itself strongly speaks to the strict fulfilment of retributive justice. Both motives—fulfilling justice according to the law of karma and improving one’s moral status through transfer of merit—are psychologically powerful and attractive, although their mutual compatibility is debatable. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Epistemic Issues in Non-classical Religious Belief)

11 pages, 241 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Reviving Pagan Spirituality: A Manifesto

by Keith Parsons

Religions 2022, 13(10), 942; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rel13100942 - 10 Oct 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1655

Abstract

Numerous contemporary neopagan movements are attempts to revive or reconstruct ancient religious belief and practice. For instance, the worship of the ancient Norse gods has been restored to Iceland by the Asatru Fellowship. In this essay, I defend neopagan movements against the charge that ancient spirituality cannot be recovered in identifiable form. I note that today’s dominant religions, such as Christianity, also face questions of the continuity of identity and argue that if such problems are tractable for current religions, then, in principle, they are resolvable for neopagans. I further argue that there are three broad themes of spirituality that are identifiable in ancient pagan religion, and that these are permanent possibilities recoverable by modern people. I also defend the relevance and importance of these themes. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Epistemic Issues in Non-classical Religious Belief)

29 pages, 5216 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Hinduism, Belief and the Colonial Invention of Religion: A before and after Comparison

by Shyam Ranganathan

Religions 2022, 13(10), 891; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rel13100891 - 22 Sep 2022

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 6810

Abstract

As known from the academic literature on Hinduism, the foreign, Persian word, “Hindu” (meaning “Indian”), was used by the British to name everything indigenously South Asian, which was not Islam, as a religion. If we adopt explication as our research methodology, which consists in the application of the criterion of logical validity to organize various propositions of perspectives we encounter in research in terms of a disagreement, we discover: (a) what the British identified as “Hinduism” was not characterizable by a shared set of beliefs or shared outlook, but a disagreement or debate about basic topics of philosophy with a discourse on tenets of moral philosophy anchoring the debate; and (b), the Western tradition’s historical commitment to language as the vehicle of thought not only leads to the conflation of propositions with beliefs, but to interpreting (explaining by way of belief) on the basis of the Eurocentric tradition rooted exclusively in ancient Greek philosophy. Interpretation on the basis of the Western tradition leads to the Western tradition vindicating itself as the non-traditional, non-religious, rational platform—the secular—for explaining everything—the residua are what get called religions on a global scale. This serves the political function of insulating Western colonialism from indigenous moral and political criticism. Given that Western colonialism is the pivotal event, before which South Asians just had philosophy, and after which they had religion (the explanatory residua of Eurocentric interpretation), we can ask about Hindu religious belief. This only pertains to the period after colonialism, when Hindus adopted a Westcentric frame for understanding their tradition as religious because of colonization. Prior to this, the tradition the British identified as “Hindu” had a wide variety of philosophical approaches to justification, which often criticized propositional attitudes, like belief, as irrational. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Epistemic Issues in Non-classical Religious Belief)

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12 pages, 399 KiB

Open AccessArticle

East Meets West: The New Gnoseology in Giordano Bruno and Wang Yangming

by Zheng Wang

Religions 2022, 13(9), 854; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rel13090854 - 14 Sep 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1749

Abstract

This study examines the various explanations of the deliberative humanity, regarding a new gnoseology in the intellectual contexts of Giordano Bruno and Wang Yangming during the 15th and 16th centuries. In a similar way to Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno for the European Renaissance, Wang Yangming is the enlightener among the representatives of Neo-Confucianism in early modern China. Each of these three takes an individual’s mind as the point of departure. They then modify the traditional theory of gnoseology, in search of the good and principle. Nevertheless, behind these similarities on the surface, the metaphorical and theoretical interpretations follow different directions. Marsilio Ficino translates hierarchic Platonism as a transcendent norm. Giordano Bruno and Wang Yangming, however, seem to liberate the individual’s humanity from the traditional norms of gnoseology. In their methodologies, they both have developed a generative gnoseology that differs from the orthodox pattern of knowledge in their respective traditions. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Epistemic Issues in Non-classical Religious Belief)

27 pages, 3863 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Religious Belief through Drum-Sound Experience: Bengal’s Devotional Dialectic of the Classical Goddess and Indigenous God

by Sukanya Sarbadhikary

Religions 2022, 13(8), 707; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rel13080707 - 01 Aug 2022

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2951

Abstract

The epistemic question about what constitutes religious belief in non-Western contexts is addressed here through the ontology of sonic experience. I demonstrate that religious beliefs are habitually ingrained as long-sustaining visceral memories, when afforded by sensory—for instance, aural—affects. Bengal’s peculiar devotional milieu constructs a prototype of oppositions. On one end is the urban, classical, martial goddess, Durga, with elite histories of acquiring a high Brahmanical form, and whose autumnal rituals are based on scriptural rules, caste hierarchies, and distance among the devotees and deity. On the other end is the rural, indigenous, non-classical, peasant god, Shiva, whose spring-time worship celebrating primordial death and regeneration is based on intensely embodied and communitarian principles of identity among the caste-equal bodies of devotee men, and even their god. Based on immersive ethnographic analyses, the paper argues that these dual psychological ends of the regional sacred cosmos are made vividly real through differential perceptive experiences of percussion sounds (ubiquitous in these festivities), their varied tempos, textures, volumes, and rhythm modulations. Through phenomenological deep listening, I describe stark styles of making and playing the sacred membranophone drum, dhak, which embodies distinct rhythm styles, relationships with rituals, and psychophysical effects on the devotional ensembles. I show how the bodies of devotees, dhak players (dhakis), deities, and even the dhak, become tied to the tonalities of the drum, which is taught through generations of deft learning among dhakis, to sound distinctly when echoed for Durga and Shiva. The paper’s main argument is that these dhak sounds, which have remained a conceptual oversight in literature, not only aid in, but indeed, enable the experience of and belief in Bengal’s divergent deities. It is through such empowering sensory sedimentations of the different sounds of the same percussion, that people recognize, remember, and maintain the region’s devotional dialectic and complex religious lifeworld. In essence, the body’s powerful experiences of drum sounds make religious belief palpable and possible. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Epistemic Issues in Non-classical Religious Belief)

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10 pages, 202 KiB

Open AccessArticle

How to Fail to Debunk Animism

by Tiddy Smith

Religions 2022, 13(7), 634; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rel13070634 - 08 Jul 2022

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1920

Abstract

Perry Hendricks argues that my common consent argument for animism fails. The failure, he argues, comes down to the fact that there is widespread agreement in non-animism. Were animism correct, then it is improbable, argues Hendricks, that animism would ever be unpopular. Hendricks’ argument is premised on several problematic assumptions, which I attempt to address. Once these assumptions are exposed, it is clear that Hendricks’ argument is weaker than it first appears, leaving my position relatively unscathed. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Epistemic Issues in Non-classical Religious Belief)

17 pages, 298 KiB

Open AccessArticle

How Not to Object to Demonic Realism

by Shandon L. Guthrie

Religions 2022, 13(7), 610; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rel13070610 - 01 Jul 2022

Viewed by 2588

Abstract

There are few academics today who actively argue against demonic realism. Much of this is perhaps due to the fact that there are comparably few defenders of such. This has created a vacuum for critics to comfortably object to the existence of demons without sophistication (for it is only in the professional exchange of ideas do bad arguments get weeded out and good arguments gain vitality). Add to this the common perception of demonology as an anti-intellectual superstition and we end up with a threshold for the success of anti-realist arguments to be set quite low. In this paper, I shall survey three of the most familiar objections to demonic realism to arise out of this skeptical intellectual environment: First, and most ambitiously, there is the impossibility of justified belief objection that proffers that belief in demons cannot even in principle be justified no matter how much (scientific) evidence there is. Alternative explanations are always to be preferred. Second, there is the demon-of-the-gaps objection (or category of objections) which insists that demonic realism is hastily posited as a pre-scientific explanation for physical, medical, and psychological mysteries. Third, there is what I call the ethical argument from scapegoating that questions the existence of demons on grounds that, if they in fact exist, such a fact would preclude moral responsibility and the possibility of retributive justice since we could never know if a bad actor was himself morally culpable for his own evils or if he was under the coercive influence of demonic agents. I argue that, despite their rhetorical appeal and kinship with the anti-supernatural sentiments of many academics today, these three arguments are not successful, for these are either based on egregious philosophical assumptions or assumptions about demonology few if any adopt. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Epistemic Issues in Non-classical Religious Belief)

21 pages, 320 KiB

Open AccessArticle

On Angels, Demons, and Ghosts: Is Justified Belief in Spiritual Entities Possible?

by David Kyle Johnson

Religions 2022, 13(7), 603; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rel13070603 - 29 Jun 2022

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 18150

Abstract

Belief in the existence of spiritual entities is an integral part of many people’s religious worldview. Angels appear, demons possess, ghosts haunt. But is belief that such entities exist justified? If not, are there conditions in which it would be? I will begin by showing why, once one clearly understands how to infer the best explanation, it is obvious that neither stories nor personal encounters can provide sufficient evidence to justify belief in spiritual entities. After responding to objections to similar arguments I have published in the past, I will go on to show that there is at least an imaginable circumstance in which belief in spiritual entities would be justified but then point out that it is not reasonable to think that such conditions will ever be met. In short, if such entities were real, it would be theoretically possible to demonstrate their existence scientifically, and in doing so, one could make belief in their existence justified. But doing so would require and entail a scientific revolution equivalent to proving that the Earth is flat. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Epistemic Issues in Non-classical Religious Belief)

9 pages, 210 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Neoclassical Theism as Inherently Dialogical

by Daniel A. Dombrowski

Religions 2022, 13(6), 529; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rel13060529 - 08 Jun 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1685

Abstract

The position usually called “process theism” is seldom called this by one of its most important defenders, Charles Hartshorne. The label he typically uses is “neoclassical theism”. It is important to notice that these two designations are not equivalent. To speak of process theism is to accentuate the differences between this metaphysical view and an opposing metaphysical stance, that of traditional or substantialist theism. By way of contrast, to speak of neoclassical theism is not to accentuate differences but rather the inclusion of one metaphysical tradition within another. That is, the neoclassical theism of Hartshorne (along with that of A.N. Whitehead, John Cobb, and David Ray Griffin, et al.) is both “neo” and “classical”. The compatibility between the best insights of classical theism and the best in neoclassical theism is evidenced in Hartshorne’s startling claim that he learned almost as much from St. Thomas Aquinas as he did from Whitehead! Although Hartshorne spent a good deal of his career pointing out that classical theism was shipwrecked on certain rocks of contradiction (neo), Thomas, more than anyone else, has provided us with an admirable chart showing the location of the rocks (classical). Three different topics will be emphasized in my defense of the thesis that “process theism” tends to be a polemical designation, in contrast to the more irenic “neoclassical theism”. The first of these is the contrast between monopolar and dipolar metaphysics. In the divine case, the neoclassical theist emphasizes the claim that, in partial contrast to the classical theistic God who does not in any way change, God always changes, and both of these words are important. The second topic is the commonplace in “process” thought that one of the most important passages in the history of metaphysical writing is in Plato’s Sophist (247e), where it is suggested that being is power or dynamis, specifically the power, however slight, both to affect other beings and to be affected by them. The third topic is Whiteheadian prehension, wherein a metaphysical thinker in the present can literally grasp and include the best insights from previous metaphysical traditions and partially transform them by bringing them into a larger whole. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Epistemic Issues in Non-classical Religious Belief)

15 pages, 265 KiB

Open AccessArticle

From Theism to Spirit Beliefs

by Hans Van Eyghen

Religions 2022, 13(5), 460; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rel13050460 - 19 May 2022

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1723

Abstract

I argue that arguments for the existence of God provide indirect support for the existence of other supernatural beings such as spirits. I defend three arguments: (i) the existence of spirits is more likely if there is a supernatural realm; (ii) an omnibenevolent God makes use of supernatural messengers; (iii) sacred scriptures attest to the existence of spirits. I defend all arguments and defend them against objections. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Epistemic Issues in Non-classical Religious Belief)

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