Matthew A. Benton – författare

Recent decades have seen a fertile period of theorizing within mainstream epistemology which has had a dramatic impact on how epistemology is done. Investigations into contextualist and pragmatic dimensions of knowledge suggest radically new ways of meeting skeptical challenges and of understanding the relation between the epistemological and practical environment. New insights from social epistemology and formal epistemology about defeat, testimony, a priority, probability, and the nature of evidence all have a potentially revolutionary effect on how we understand our epistemological place in the world. Religion is the place where such rethinking can potentially have its deepest impact and importance. Yet there has been surprisingly little infiltration of these new ideas into philosophy of religion and the epistemology of religious belief. Knowledge, Belief, and God incorporates these myriad new developments in mainstream epistemology, and extends these developments to questions and arguments in religious epistemology. The investigations proposed in this volume offer substantial new life, breadth, and sophistication to issues in the philosophy of religion and analytic theology. They pose original questions and shed new light on long-standing issues in religious epistemology; and these developments will in turn generate contributions to epistemology itself, since religious belief provides a vital testing ground for recent epistemological ideas.

Epistemological questions about the significance of disagreement have advanced alongside broader developments in social epistemology concerning testimony, the nature of expertise and epistemic authority, the role of institutions, group belief, and epistemic injustice, among others. During this period, related issues in the epistemology of religion have re-emerged as worthy of new consideration, and available to be situated with new conceptual tools. Does disagreement between, and within, religions challenge the rationality of religious commitment? How should religious adherents think about exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist frameworks as applied to religious truth, or to matters of salvation or redemption or liberation? This volume explores many of these issues at the intersection of the epistemology of disagreement and religious epistemology. It engages in careful reflection on religious diversity and disagreement, offering ways to balance epistemic humility with personal conviction. Recognizing the place of religious differences in our social lives, it provides renewed efforts at how best to think about truths concerning religion.

This Element examines a main theme in religious epistemology, namely, the possibility of knowledge of God. Most often philosophers consider the rationality or justification of propositional belief about God, particularly beliefs about the existence and nature of God; and they will assess the conditions under which, if there is a God, such propositional beliefs would be knowledge, particularly in light of counter-evidence or the availability of religious disagreement. This Element surveys such familiar areas, then turns toward newer and less-developed terrain: interpersonal epistemology, namely what it is to know another person. It then explores the prospects for understanding what it might take to know God relationally, the contours of which are significant for many theistic traditions.