In this paper Evan Fales considers whether (religious) faith has any role to play in conferring positive epistemic status to (especially religious) beliefs. He outlines several conceptions of faith that have been historically important within Western religious traditions. He then considers what role faith might be supposed to play, so understood, within the framework of internalist and externalist accounts of knowledge. His general conclusion is that, insofar as faith itself is a justified epistemic attitude, it requires justification and acquires that justification only through the regular faculties for contingent truths: sense perception and reason. Fales also argues that the operations of our cognitive faculties in arriving at epistemic judgments on matters of substance are sufficiently complex, subtle, and often temporally prolonged, to make it exceptionally difficult to reconstruct the cognitive process and to judge whether it meets standards of rationality.
In his recent opinion on the legality of teaching intelligent design in the classroom (Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School Board), Judge John Jones correctly found against Dover, but did so by employing mistaken premises. Two unsound arguments appear in Section 4 of Kitzmiller, "Whether ID is Science." The first argument seeks to establish that ID is not a science by showing that it invokes supernatural causes outside of the purview of science. The second argument purports to show that even successful criticisms of Darwinism do not constitute evidence for ID. Neither flaw enhances the scientific credentials of ID, but each bolsters the erroneous perception that Darwinists assume as a matter of faith that either supernatural causes do not exist, or else cannot be investigated scientifically. A natural implication of this erroneous perception is that Darwinism is simply an alternative kind of faith, but in fact both Darwinism and many supernaturalistic hypotheses are amenable to empirical test.
In this contribution to an American Philosophical Association symposium on "God, Death, and the Meaning of Life," Evan Fales considers three responses to loss of faith in the Christian God: despair, optimism, and rebellion. Western culture is permeated by belief in an afterlife on religious grounds, shaping these responses in particularly anxious ways. Fales considers both how atheists can respond to the question of the meaning of life, and, in what is surely a surprising direction for some, whether Christianity even has the resources to provide meaning through doctrines as problematic as requiring another to pay for your own sins. In July 2007 Fales updated this paper for the Secular Web by expanding his discussion of reasons to doubt the moral acceptability of another person (such as Jesus) absolving individuals of responsibility for their sins (or wrongdoings) through sacrifice, substitution, or by serving as a moral exemplar.
Review of Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature, by Larry Arnhart.
"Theistic philosophers have perennially cited mystical experiences—experiences of God—as evidence for God’s existence and for other truths about God. In recent years, the attractiveness of this line of thought has been reflected in its use by a significant number of philosophers. But both philosophers and mystics agree that not all mystical experiences can be relied upon; many are the stuff of delusion. So they have somehow to be checked out, their bona-fides revealed."
To the extent that loyalty to religious traditions, and appeal to religious authority, are analogous to an appeal to alien political traditions—to that extent a discountenancing of such appeals will be, by parity of reasoning, appropriate within a liberal democracy. Citizens should be free to pursue their religious commitments, so long as those are not incompatible with secular order; but religious reasons as such, not otherwise warrantable, have no place in our political discourse. That is not because they are not "political reasons", but precisely because they are—or are too close to being so. They retain, in spite of their historical divergence from politics, a structurally identical role for appeals to authority, tradition, legal precedent, group solidarity, and the like.
