Table Of Content

I RATIONALITY AND RELIGIOUS COMMITMENT Rationality and Religious Commitment Robert Audi CLARENDON PRESS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, 0X2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Robert Audi 2011 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First published 2011 First published in paperback 2013 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Righto Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978-0-19-960957—4 (Hbk.) ISDN 978-0-19-968661-2 (Pbk.) Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. To the Memory of William P. Alston Contents Preface x Acknowledgments xiv Part I. Four Epistemological Standards: Rationality and Reasonableness, Justification and Knowledge 1. Rationality in Thought and Action 3 I. The contours of rationality 6 II. Rationality and reasons: theoretical and practical 10 III. The practical authority of theoretical reason 13 IV. Rationality and its experiential grounds 16 V. Rationality, reasoning, and responsiveness to experience 20 2. Justification, Knowledge, and Reasonableness 24 I. Rationality and justification 24 II. Rationality as normatively more permissive than justification 29 III. Justification and knowledge 34 IV. Reasonableness 39 V. Rationality and reasonableness in the aesthetic domain 40 VI. The normative appraisal of religious commitments 43 Part II. The Dimensions of Rational Religious Commitment 3. Belief, Faith, Acceptance, and Hope 51 I. The nature and varieties of faith 52 II. Conditions for rational faith: a preliminary sketch 66 III. Fiducial faith 68 IV. Acceptance 80 V. Faith, belief, and hope: some normative contrasts 84 4. The Diversity of Religious Commitment 89 I. Religious commitment in the context of existential narratives 89 viii CONTENTS II. Attitudinal and volitional elements in religious commitments 92 III. Institutional aspects of religious conduct 95 IV. Degrees of religious commitment 99 5. Experiential and Pragmatic Aspects of Religious Commitments 105 I. Religious experiences as possible support for theism 107 II. Perceptual religious experiences 112 III. The normative authority of religious experience 117 IV. The pragmatic dimension of support for religious commitment 125 V. The doxastic practice approach to defending the rationality of theism 129 VI. Religious experience, fiducial attitudes, and religious conduct 131 Part III. Religion, Theology, and Morality 6. Religious Commitment and Moral Obligation 137 I. Divine command ethics 138 II. Divine commandedness versus divine commandability 142 III. Divine commandability, obligation, and the good 151 IV. The autonomy of ethics and the moral authority of God 153 V. Religiously grounded conduct 160 7. Religious Integration and Human Flourishing 165 I. The scope of religious integration 166 II. Sociopolitical aspects of religious integration 171 III. Natural theology and the obligations of citizenship 174 IV. Theism and the scientific habit of mind 181 V. The aesthetic dimension of religious commitment 184 Part IV. The Rationality of Religious Commitment in the Postmodern World 8. Internal Challenges to the Rationality of Religious Commitment 1^1 I. The divine attributes ^ II. Pluralism, defeasibility, and rationality ^ III. Rational religious disagreement, skepticism, and humility 201 CONTENTS ix 9. The Problem of Evil 205 I. A conception of the problem of evil 205 II. The axiology of good and evil 209 III. A theocentric versus a cosmocentric approach to the problem 214 IV. Moral evil in a world under God 219 V. Theological choiceworthiness 228 VI. Natural evil 231 VII. Dimensions of divine knowledge 240 10. The Challenge of Naturalism 247 I. Philosophical naturalism 247 II. Scientific explanation and cosmological perplexity 250 III. Personhood, mental substance, and embodiment 253 IV. The possibility of divine embodiment 257 V. Mental causation and mentalistic explanation 264 VI. Causation, causal explanation, and causal power 270 VII. The causal closure versus the causal sufficiency of the physical world 276 VIII. Intellectual economy and the scientific approach to the world 281 Conclusion 286 References 297 Index 307 Preface The title of this book might lead some readers to wonder why we should raise any question of the rationality of religious commitment. Others will wonder what rationality is taken to be and what is supposed to constitute a religious commitment. Both reactions—among others—are understandable. There are also many people, including many philoso phers, theologians, and students of religion, who want a better under standing of rationality, of religious commitment, and of the relation between the two. This book is addressed largely to those who seek such understanding, but it is written in a way that should make it useful for some who are simply interested in specific questions it addresses or in the general question of how, in the present age, philosophy bears on religion. It should be plain to anyone aware of how religion is viewed by the intelligentsia in the Western world that many educated people—and certainly many philosophers—doubt whether far-reaching religious commitments, including some of the kinds called for by Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, are rational. Such doubt may be reinforced by argu ments, for instance those aimed at showing that the evil there is makes it at best unlikely that this is a world under a wholly good, all-knowing and all-powerful God. But often the basis of the doubt is a sense that religious belief in some way runs counter to the scientific habit of mind that should prevail in our formation and testing of worldviews. This book addresses both sources of doubt. It is impossible to do justice to the notions of rationality and religious commitment in the wide-ranging way I attempt here without abstracting from particular theologies and from the tenets peculiar to any single religion. But too great a distance from any particular theology or religi°n must also be avoided if the ideas developed are to enhance understanding of actual religions. I have therefore framed most of the discussion on two assumptions: that the religions in question are centered on a conception of God as, in nature, all-knowing, all-powerful, and perfecdy good, and as, in relation to us, sovereign in the universe and caring about human preface beings. In places I cite the Bible as a paradigm of religious s ■ Christian theology—understood very broadl pture>and1 AthfeioollooRgYy-- But I have tried to write in a way that rend^T Cof applicable to other scriptures, other theology niain .points gions outside the Western religious tradition epitomized bv Ch Judaism, and Islam. Many points in the book apply t0 nonT"^' religions as well, but they are not directly addressed. " In contrast with many writers in the philosophy of religion I do not identify rationality with justification or even with reasonableness and I do not tie either one as closely to knowledge as is common in philosophy. Part I has two aims: to present (with refinements drawn from my later work) part of the account of rationality I have developed in The Architecture of Reason: The Structure and Substance of Rationality (Oxford, 2001) and to bring the account to bear on the special case of religious commitment. The result provides more to work with in approaching the topic of the rationality of religious commitment than we would otherwise have. If, for instance, someone doubts whether such a commitment is intellectually respectable—and I believe there are many who doubt this or simply presuppose a negative answer—we can ask whether the question is one of rationality, of reasonableness, of justification, or of the possibility (or existence) of knowledge regarding one or another religious tenet or attitude. There is a related contrast with many other writers in the philosophy of religion. It has been common in the discussions in the philosophy of religion, probably even typical outside a small group of specialists in the field, to decide the question of the rationality (or general intelle acceptability) of a commitment to religion by concentrating on t e evidences for religious beliefs. I recognize the importance o beliefs for appraising the rationality of religious commitment, that there are important dimensions of religious commitmen ’ behavioral, attitudinal, and emotional need not rest entirely on that of beliefs. An ove re ^ t a certain *s a commitment to act in certain ways as well as jeeds, outlook on the world; and it requires doing a certai maintaining cultivating or nurturing certain attitudes and em° au openness to responses from other people. A third difference between my approach in the philosophy of religion and most others concerns my conception of faith. I consider religious faith irreducible to a kind of belief, particularly where the object of faith is a proposition, such as that God loves us.There is propositional faith that entails believing the proposition toward which it is directed, but this is not the only kind of faith. Other attitudes besides belief can carry the intellectual content of at least one’s major religious commitments. Acceptance and hope are two other attitudes I explore. Here, then, the book does extensive work on the philosophy of mind side of philosophy of religion. A full-scale religious commitment affects life in an overall way. It calls for a certain outlook on the world and for certain conduct, attitudes, and emotions. All these have important implications for every major dimen sion of life. With this in mind, I explore the relation between the religious and, on the other hand, the ethical, the aesthetic, the political, and the intellectual. I am, then, inquiring into the rationality of religious commitment from a life-choice perspective, not just a cognitive-choice perspec tive. This wider perspective raises numerous questions. How is the daily life of a religiously committed person different from that of a secular person of otherwise similar constitution? What kinds of ethical views are open to such theists? How might their aesthetic life complement their religious life? How can they balance their religious commitments with a political life appropriate to the kind of pluralistic world many of us live in? On the intellectual side, how can such theists account for the enormity of the evils in the world if it is under divine sovereignty? Questions also arise concerning ethics: Do moral standards depend on divine will, or is ethics in some way autonomous? Concerning science, an important question is how such theists might reconcile their religious understanding of the universe with the cultivation of a scientific habit of mind of the kind appropriate to studying the natural world. I seek to answer these questions in a way that is sufficiently definite to bear on major religions but also leaves open a number of options we should not foreclose. One option concerns the kind of faith f°r 111 stance, belief-entailing or not— that is most appropriate for a particular religious tenet or toward God or human beings. Indeed, I leave ope whether a religious person might, in at least some instances, have only *