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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pittard, John, author.
Title: Disagreement, deference, and religious commitment / John Pittard.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “The striking extent of religious disagreement suggests that religious conviction is very often the result of processes that do not reliably produce true beliefs. For this reason, many have argued that the only rational response to religious disagreement is to adopt a religious skepticism that eschews confident religious belief. This book contests this conclusion, explaining how it could be rational to maintain confident religious (or irreligious) belief even in the face of persistent disagreement. Part One argues against the commitment to rigorous epistemic impartiality that underlies the case for disagreementmotivated religious skepticism, while also critiquing highly sanguine approaches to disagreement that allow for an unproblematic privileging of one’s first-person perspective. According to the position defended in Part One, justified confidence in the face of religious disagreement is likely to require that one have rational insight into reasons that favor one’s outlook. It is argued that many of the rational insights that are crucial to assessing religious outlooks are not achievable through analytical reasoning, but only through having the right sort of emotional experiences. Part Two considers the implications for religious commitment of accepting the impartiality requirement favored by ‘disagreement skeptics.’ Challenges are raised to the assumption that a commitment to rigorous epistemic impartiality rules out confident religious belief. But it is further argued that such a commitment would likely make it irrational to pursue one’s favored form of religious life and might lead to normative uncertainty that would prevent rational engagement in any religious or irreligious way of life whatsoever”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019021280 | ISBN 9780190051815 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190051822 (epdf) | ISBN 9780190051839 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Belief and doubt. | Knowledge, Theory of (Religion) | Skepticism. | Religion—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC BD215 .P58 2019 | DDC 218—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021280
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
To my parents
2.6
2.5.1
2.5.2
I. AGAINST IMPARTIALITY
3.
3.2
3.3 Instrumentalism and Fundamental
3.4 Beyond Instrumentalism to Independence?
3.5 The Explanatory Power of
3.6
3.7 Two Objections to Weak
3.7.1
3.7.2
3.8
4. Partisan Justification and Religious Belief
4.1 Sources of Partisan Justification: The
4.2 Against Radically Permissivist, Externalist, and Agent-Centered Accounts of Partisan Justification
4.3 Against Moderately Permissivist
4.4
4.4.1
4.4.2
4.5
4.5.1
5.
5.1
5.2
5.3
5.4
5.5
5.6 Rationalist
5.6.1
5.6.2
5.6.3 Moderate Religious Insight in the Face of Religious Pluralism
5.7 Looking Ahead: Why the Rationalist Should Care about the Implications of Epistemic Impartiality
II. WHAT DOES IMPARTIALITY REQUIRE?
6. Elusive Impartiality
6.1 Self-Undermining Worries for Conciliationism
6.2 Why Resolute Conciliationism May Not Be Arbitrary
6.3
6.4
6.5
6.6
6.7
6.8
6.9
6.10
7. Unpalatable Conclusions
7.1
7.2
7.3
7.3.1
7.3.2
7.3.3
Acknowledgments
This book is about the challenge that systematic and pervasive religious disagreement poses to confident religious (or irreligious) commitment. I have been seriously engaged with philosophical questions about disagreement since 2005, when I first encountered Thomas Kelly’s seminal article “The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement.” In 2006, I began graduate school at Yale with the intention of writing a dissertation in the epistemology of disagreement. I did so, submitting my dissertation in 2013. In 2015, I began working in earnest on this book. Throughout this journey, I’ve been helped in my thinking and work on disagreement by a great many teachers, friends, students, and family members. I want to thank them here, recognizing that I am no doubt forgetting some who have helped in important ways.
Keith DeRose influenced me significantly during my graduate work at Yale, both through the classes he taught and also as a generous and incisive dissertation advisor. He also read drafts of multiple parts of this book and provided valuable suggestions. John Hare was another important teacher and advisor during my time as a graduate student. Since I joined him on the faculty of Yale Divinity School, he has continued to be a supportive mentor and advisor. My colleague and friend Daniel Greco read drafts of every chapter and provided great feedback that was as supportive and helpful as it was challenging and incisive. I am immensely grateful for his help.
Others who have helped me by reading or discussing parts of the book or preceding essays include Alex Arnold, Emad Atiq, Matthew Benton, Michael Bergmann, Tomas Bogardus, Lara Buchak, Isaac Choi, David Christensen, Michael Della Rocca, Katherine Dormandy, Kent Dunnington, Adam Eitel, Tamar Gendler, Clifton Granby, Daniel Immerman, Klaas Kraay, Dustin Locke, Jonathan Matheson, Jack Sanchez, Miriam Schoenfield, SunJoo Shin, Fred Simmons, Jason Stanley, Bart Streumer, Zoltan Szabo, Josh Thurow, Michael Titelbaum, Matthew Vermaire, Bruno Whittle, and Alex Worsnip. The book also owes much to the detailed criticisms and suggestions of multiple anonymous referees. I’m grateful to students in multiple seminars where I have taught on disagreement and related material. Teaching really is
one of the best ways to learn, especially when students are as perceptive, inquisitive, and creative as those I’ve been blessed to interact with.
Special thanks are due to Nathan Dowell, who served as my research assistant in the summers of 2018 and 2019. Nathan offered detailed editorial feedback, making multiple suggestions on nearly every page of the manuscript. The writing has benefited significantly from his careful work. He also later helped to produce the index.
I am very grateful to Peter Ohlin at Oxford University Press for his support of this work. I also extend sincere thanks to Madeleine Freeman and others at Oxford University Press who helped shepherd this work to publication, to project manager Asish Krishna, and to Martha Ramsey for her work as copyeditor.
My thinking has been challenged and sharpened by engaging with audience members at various venues where I’ve presented work related to the present volume. Some of the ideas and arguments that are featured in chapter 2 were presented at the 2011 Purdue Summer Seminar on Perceptual, Moral, and Religious Skepticism, organized by Michael Bergmann. A predecessor of chapter 3 was presented in 2014 at the Philosophy of Religion Colloquium at Yale and at the Defeat and Religious Epistemology Workshop at Oxford University (part of the New Insights and Directions for Religious Epistemology project). Essays that became the basis for material in chapters 4 and 5 were presented at a symposium of the 2015 congress of the Canadian Philosophical Association in Ottawa, at the Summer Research Retreat on Moral Epistemology and Moral Psychology hosted in 2015 by the Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University, and at the Arguing Religion conference hosted in 2017 by Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento. An initial version of chapter 6 was delivered as a lecture at the University of Texas, San Antonio, in 2016. Much of chapter 7 was presented in 2018 at the Chapel Hill Normativity Workshop at the University of North Carolina.
I’m grateful to the publishers of the following articles for granting me permission to include material from them in this book:
“Fundamental Disagreements and the Limits of Instrumentalism,” Synthese, forthcoming (published online 2018), https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11229-018-1691-1.
“Religious Disagreement,” in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ISSN 2161-0002, https://www.iep.utm.edu/rel-disa/.
Finally, I want to thank my family. Alicia, my wife, has supported and helped me in an untold number of ways. She’s read drafts of many sections, and her detailed feedback has helped me to be a better writer. She’s solo parented three kids many days, evenings, and weekends to give me time to devote to this project. She’s celebrated the triumphs along the way, big and small. And she’s believed in me through all of the setbacks. I am so thankful. My children, Thomas, Camille, and Samantha, besides being a source of joy and delight, have shown much patience and understanding when my work has imposed on our time together as a family. Thankfully, I’ve been able to join them in many adventures, and I hope that a great many more lie ahead.
My parents, each in their distinctive ways, have been models for me of the commitment to seeking after truth and living in its light. With immense gratitude, I dedicate this book to them.
Disagreement, Deference, and Religious Commitment
Introduction
I.1 Topic and Approach
This book explores the challenge that disagreement poses to the rationality of confident religious (or irreligious) commitment. I won’t try to give a precise account of what commitments count as being religious (or irreligious), but you surely qualify as having such a commitment if you take a confident stance on any of the following questions. When confronted with arresting natural beauty, is it appropriate to feel gratitude? When a loved one has died, should you strive for an attitude of stoic acceptance, hope for eventual reunion, or frankly confront the tragic absurdity of permanent separation? Was the universe created by God? If so, does every event conform to the divine plan for creation, or might the universe unfold in ways that God neither expected nor desired? Was the Buddha enlightened? Is Jesus God incarnate? Was Muhammad God’s prophet?
Answer any of these “religious” questions, and you will find yourself in disagreement with many people who appear to be as informed and thoughtful as yourself but who adopt some opposing view. The striking extent of religious disagreement, and its frequent persistence in the face of dialogue, raises worries about the reasonability of taking a stand on religious questions, whether one’s stance is religious or explicitly irreligious. The challenge that religious disagreement poses to religious belief may initially be expressed as follows.1 If you have good reason for thinking it likely that the mental processes that have produced some specific belief of yours are processes that do not reliably lead to true belief, then it is not reasonable for you to confidently persist in that belief. To use language commonly employed by epistemologists, good evidence that your belief in proposition p has been produced and maintained by unreliable processes constitutes a defeater for that belief, meaning that such evidence undermines whatever
1 In chapter 7, I will consider how disagreement may also pose a challenge to the rationality of religious commitments that do not involve confident religious belief.
initial justification the belief may have had. And facts about religious disagreement give you good reason to think that your beliefs on controversial religious questions are the product of unreliable processes.
In support of this last claim, note first that the fact that there is so much disagreement over religious questions means that a good deal of people affirm answers to these questions that are false; and this in turn strongly suggests that in a large portion of cases, the processes that give rise to beliefs on religious matters are not reliable, or at least they are not reliable when directed toward religious questions. And it is unlikely that a more favorable verdict will be reached when one looks specifically at the process or processes that lie behind some particular religious or irreligious belief of yours. Whether that belief is the product of philosophical reasoning, trust in the testimony of others, “mystical” experience, or some combination of these or other processes, there are no doubt many others who have arrived at contrary religious views by means of relevantly similar processes. It seems, then, that consideration of the nature and scope of religious disagreement gives you strong reason to think that the processes that lie behind your religious or irreligious beliefs are unreliable. Since you have good reason to think this, it is not reasonable to remain confident on religious matters.
The argument just rehearsed is overly hasty, and I will refine and strengthen it in due course. But even if there are steps in the argument that deserve philosophical scrutiny, I hope that it is evident that there is a troubling worry here. One can plausibly maintain that humankind in its present incarnation is quite good at forming true beliefs in those domains of inquiry that are characterized by significant consensus, including mathematics, most areas of science, and to a significant extent even morality (despite a number of prominent areas of moral contention). But human beings clearly are not reliably good at forming true beliefs with respect to religious questions.2 Having acknowledged this, would not continued confidence in one’s own religious opinions amount to little more than unwarranted epistemic hubris? Given that even the most intelligent and thoughtful of those who devote themselves to religious questions are, taken as a whole, highly unreliable, isn’t the only reasonable stance one of religious skepticism that refuses to confidently answer any central religious question?
2 One might contest this generalization by noting that the majority of human beings do agree on some religious questions, for example the existence of God. So perhaps human beings are, taken as a whole, epistemically reliable on some religious matters. This important suggestion will receive significant attention in chapter 6.
Grappling with these questions is the central task of this book. Questions about the epistemic significance of religious disagreement cannot, of course, be separated from questions concerning the significance of disagreement more generally, and a good deal of this book is concerned with developing a fully general theory of the rational significance of disagreement. I defend a principled middle way between extreme “conciliatory” approaches to disagreement that are committed to rigorous epistemic impartiality and highly sanguine approaches that allow for an unproblematic privileging of one’s first-person perspective. Identifying this middle way requires distinguishing between two kinds of impartiality: agent impartiality (which I endorse) and reasons impartiality (which I oppose). According to the position I defend, it can be rational to maintain confident belief in the face of disagreement with others who appear to be equally qualified, but this is likely to require that one have genuine insight into the greater rational merits of one’s outlook.
Deciding on a general approach to disagreement will not by itself settle the question of how one ought to respond to religious controversy. Rather, one’s general approach to disagreement will determine an agenda of questions that must be answered in order to determine the epistemic implications of religious disagreement. This book pursues two such agendas, each arising from a different approach to disagreement. The first approach I will consider is the one I endorse—an approach that does not require the most rigorous form of epistemic impartiality. The second approach I will consider is one that does require this rigorous form of epistemic impartiality. While I oppose this second approach, I do not have a fully decisive argument against it. For this reason, it is worth exploring what bearing it has on religious commitment.
If my favored approach is correct, then how a person should respond to religious disagreement will significantly depend on whether that person’s views on religious matters are genuinely insightful. In considering whether it is plausible that a given person has insight on religious matters, I will need to address questions about the character of religious insight and about the role that religious experiences might play in the acquisition of such insight.
If the second and more deferential approach to disagreement is correct, then a key question is whether there is some “doxastic stance” on religious matters that has the best claim to being the stance of impartiality (where a “doxastic stance” encompasses attitudes of belief as well as of skepticism). As I will show, answering this question requires that one address vexing questions about the sources of religious bias and the kinds of qualifications that are most important in assessing religious claims. Another key question
is whether someone who pursues epistemic impartiality could nonetheless rationally maintain a robust form of religious commitment that does not require holding controversial religious beliefs.
As this summary of agenda items should make clear, a cursory application of some disagreement framework to the religious domain will not be sufficient. A proper assessment of the challenge posed by religious disagreement must substantively engage with central questions in the epistemology of disagreement and with several important questions in the epistemology of religious belief. I aim to make significant progress on both of these fronts in this book.
This is a book by an epistemologist for epistemologists, but not only for epistemologists. Or at least not only for professional epistemologists. If there is any topic that can motivate the layperson to wade into thorny epistemological questions, disagreement is surely one of them. Unlike Cartesian skeptical scenarios involving lifelike dreams or deceptive demons, possibilities that raise difficult epistemological questions but generally do not occasion real doubt about one’s epistemic standing, disagreement frequently does lead to genuine worry and loss of confidence. When those worries concern not only some isolated beliefs but one’s entire moral, philosophical, or religious outlook, epistemological questions gain an uncommon urgency. With this in mind, I have tried to write a book that is approachable enough to be useful to nonspecialists who may not be steeped in the specialized vocabulary of contemporary epistemology.
I.2 Overview of Chapters and Reading Guide
Here is where the argument is headed. In part I, I argue against the epistemic impartiality requirement that undergirds the strongest argument for disagreement-motivated religious skepticism. I commend instead a rationalist approach to disagreement that does not rule out confident religious (or irreligious) belief even in the face of pervasive and systematic religious disagreement. Chapter 1 begins by clarifying the focus of the book, which may be called the “higher-order argument for disagreement-motivated religious skepticism.” I then show that a viable version of this higher-order argument must posit three constraints on the factors that may justifiably ground epistemic self-trust in the face of religious disagreement. These constraints are an “internal reason constraint,” an “agent impartiality constraint,” and a
“reasons impartiality constraint.” The position I develop and defend in part I is a rationalist position that endorses the internal reason and agent impartiality constraints but rejects the reasons impartiality constraint.
As a first step in arguing against a reasons impartiality requirement, I turn in chapter 2 to two very different arguments for some sort of reasons impartiality constraint, one from David Christensen (who is focused on disagreement in general) and one from John Schellenberg (whose focus is religious disagreement in particular). I argue that neither argument is successful.
In chapter 3, I develop and defend an approach to disagreement that rejects the strong epistemic impartiality requirement endorsed by “strong conciliationists.” The central tenet of the “weak conciliationism” that I defend is a requirement that I call “instrumentalism.” Instrumentalism supplies a basis for demanding conciliatory requirements in disagreements that are rationally superficial, but does not support similarly demanding conciliatory requirements in fundamental disagreements that are the result of divergent epistemic starting points. I argue that the radical impartiality requirement of strong conciliationism, which does issue demanding conciliatory prescriptions in fundamental disputes, is unmotivated in light of the explanatory power of instrumentalism. One should therefore affirm a weak conciliationism that allows for the possibility of reasonable confidence in the face fundamental disagreements with highly qualified disputants.
Weak conciliationism rejects any sort of sweeping epistemic impartiality requirement. Nevertheless, weak conciliationism does not itself supply an account of when it is rationally acceptable to adopt “partisan” epistemic starting points that do not accord with epistemic impartiality. My general position on disagreement is therefore not complete until the weak conciliationism I defend in chapter 3 is combined with a theory of “partisan justification.” Developing such a theory is the task of chapter 4. According to the rationalist account of partisan justification that I defend, justified religious belief in the face of religious disagreement is likely to require that one have rational insight into the greater rational merits of one’s own religious outlook. In assigning this significance to rational insight, I stand opposed to the most prominent approach to religious epistemology of the last thirty to forty years, the tradition of “reformed epistemology” that was most forcefully promulgated by Alvin Plantinga and William Alston. I argue that the religious epistemologies of Plantinga and Alston, which deemphasize the significance of rational insight and rational assessment, do not have the resources to meet the higherorder challenge posed by religious disagreement.
Chapter 5 considers further what implications rationalist weak conciliationism has for religious belief. Initially, the rationalist position I endorse may seem to imply that justified religious belief is a philosophical accomplishment reserved only for those blessed with a great deal of analytical sophistication. The view might also seem to imply that personal religious experience plays at best a minor role in accounting for the rationality of religious belief. But I argue that these alleged implications follow from my view only if one presupposes an “austere rationalism” that sees all rational insight as a product of (ostensibly) dispassionate analytical faculties. I urge that such a view be rejected in favor of an “affective rationalism” that emphasizes the essential role played by the emotions in facilitating insight into evaluative questions.
Throughout chapters 1–5, which make up part I, my aim is to oppose a reasons impartiality requirement and to commend a rationalist approach to disagreement that does not rule out confident religious (or irreligious) belief. While I think that the discussion in part I puts the strong conciliationist who supports reasons impartiality on the defensive, I concede that I do not have a knockdown argument that shows strong conciliationism to be hopelessly misguided. For this reason, I am not content merely to argue against epistemic impartiality. In part II, I accept for sake of discussion that strong conciliationism is correct and consider what the implications of this supposition are for religious commitment.
The central claim of chapter 6 (the first chapter of part II) is that epistemic impartiality in the religious domain is elusive. The first reason for this has to do with a vexing self-undermining challenge that confronts conciliatory approaches to disagreement. I consider various ways that the conciliationist might respond to this self-undermining problem, and I argue that a viable response to the problem is unlikely to be compatible with a commitment to full epistemic impartiality in the religious domain. The second reason why epistemic impartiality proves elusive in the religious domain is that the most plausible methods for identifying an impartial doxastic stance on religious matters will require that one take a stand on various questions that are themselves implicated in religious controversy. In particular, one must take a stand on questions concerning the importance of various epistemic credentials in the religious domain and concerning the degree to which various factors bias people’s religious thinking. These questions cannot be settled in a religiously impartial way. Because it is extremely unclear how the strong conciliationist should proceed in light of the elusiveness of impartiality, I contend that it is
far from obvious that the commitment to epistemic impartiality vindicates religious skepticism.
Even if strong conciliationism does require religious skepticism, some have suggested that one can maintain robust religious commitment while conforming to the prescriptions of strong conciliationism. This is thought to be possible because there are forms of religious commitment where one can be committed to an outlook without believing in it. In chapter 7, I present arguments that challenge the view that such “nondoxastic” religious commitment is a rational option for someone who conforms to strong conciliationism. The most radical argument that I defend concludes that conformity to strong conciliationism makes rational decision-making in the religious domain impossible. If this argument is right, then the strong conciliationist cannot rationally engage in any religious or irreligious way of life.
I end this introduction with brief reading plans for different sorts of readers of this book. Many readers, I hope, will be keenly interested both in the general epistemology of disagreement and in the epistemology of religious belief. The entire book should be of interest to such readers.
To readers interested in the epistemology of disagreement but less interested in religious belief in particular, I offer a caveat and a suggested reading plan. The caveat is that some sections that are focused on religious belief also have significant relevance to more general issues and questions in the epistemology of disagreement. There is reason to think that the general discussion of disagreement would profit significantly from more serious engagement with the messy reality of religious disagreement. To be sure, the highly idealized cases of two-person disagreement that have been the focus of much of the disagreement literature are helpful since they allow one to isolate variables of epistemic significance. But attending to the real-world example of religious disagreement presents opportunities to clarify various disagreement policies and surfaces challenges to those policies that are obscured in idealized examples.
That being said, here is a suggested reading plan for those who want to focus on general issues in the epistemology of disagreement while passing over most of the material more particularly focused on religious disagreement. Look at chapter 1, sections 1.4 and 1.6, for orientation to some key commitments of the “disagreement skeptic.” Then read chapter 2, sections 2.1–4; chapter 3; chapter 4, sections 4.1–4; chapter 6, sections 6.1–2; and chapter 7 (perhaps skipping section 7.1).
To readers primarily interested in issues pertaining to religious commitment, I encourage you to read the whole book. The general approach to disagreement that I defend informs the sections focused on religion. And I’ve worked hard to make the more technical epistemological arguments accessible to a broad philosophical audience. That being said, here is a reading plan that emphasizes those sections most relevant to religious belief and religious commitment: chapter 1; chapter 2, sections 2.5–6; chapter 3; chapter 4; chapter 5; chapter 6, sections 6.4–10; and chapter 7, up through section 7.1. Chapter 3 is not focused on religious belief, but I’ve included it in this reading plan since it is so crucial to much of the discussion that follows.
