Conciliationist Approach to the Challenge of Religious Disagreement

Document Type : Original Research

Author
Ghazaleh Hojjati
PhD. Student of Philosophy of Religion, Department of Philosophy of Religion, Institute of Contemporary Wisdom, Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, Tehran, Iran.
10.30497/prr.2018.2350
Abstract
Conciliationists believe that after the emergence of disagreement between epistemic peers, one cannot reasonably be committed to her previous belief or her degree of confidence in that. From this viewpoint, reasonable doxastic attitude in confronting disagreement is suspension of judgment or reducing the degree of confidence in the previous belief. Religious conciliationists believe that religious diversity challenges the justification of religious believes so that the reasonable epistemic response is to suspend the judgment till finding some appropriate evidence that demonstrates the advantage of one position over the other, or to reduce the level of confidence in God’s existence/ non-existence to the extent that disagreement disappears and the two parties come close together. They hold that the two parties should be in such a position, unless one of them achieve some preferred evidence that raises her level of confidence close to belief. There are three serious objections to conciliationism: easy justification, skepticism, and self-contradictoriness. So, if they have to demonstrate their view, Conciliationists should inevitably answer these objections. In this paper, I will argue that none of their answers is acceptable.
Keywords
Conciliationism
Steadfast View
Higher-order Defeater
Equal Weight View
Independence Principle
Bogardus, Tomas. 2013. “Disagreeing with the (Religious) Skeptic.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 74 (1): 5–17.
Christensen, David. 2009. “Disagreement as Evidence: The Epistemology of Controversy.” Philosophy Compass 4 (5): 756–767.
Christensen, David. 2011. “Disagreement, Question-Begging and Epistemic SelfCriticism.” Philosopher’s Imprint 11 (6): 1–22.
Elga, Adam. 2010. “How to Disagree About How to Disagree.” Pp. 175-186 in Disagreement, edited by R. Feldman and T. Warfield. New York: Oxford University Press.
Feldman, Richard. 2007. “Reasonable Religious Disagreements.” Pp. 194-214 in Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, edited by Louise Antony. Oxford University Press.
Frances, Bryan. 2005. Skepticism Comes Alive. New York: Oxford University Press.
Frances, Bryan. 2010. “Disagreement.” Pp. 68-74 in Companion to Epistemology, edited by D. Pritchard and S. Bernecker. New York: Routledge.
Kelly, Thomas. 2010. “Peer Disagreement and Higher Order Evidence.” Pp. 111–174 in Disagreement, edited by R. Feldman and T. Warfield. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kelly, Thomas. 2013. “Disagreement and the Burdens of Judgment.” Pp. 31-53 in The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays, edited by D. Christensen and J. Lackey. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kelly, Thomas. 2014. “Believers as Thermometers.” Pp. 301-314 in The Ethics of Belief: Individual and Social, edited by J. Matheson and R. Vitz. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kornblith, Hilary. 2013. “Is Philosophical Knowledge Possible?” pp. 131-149 in Disagreement and Skepticism, edited by D. Machuca. New York: Routledge.
Lackey, Jennifer. 2013. “Disagreement and Belief Dependence: Why Numbers Matter.” Pp. 243-268 in The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays, edited by D. Christensen and J. Lackey. New York: Oxford University Press.
Matheson, Jonathan. 2015. The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement. Palgrave, Macmillan.
Pittard, John. 2014. “Conciliationism and Religious Disagreement.” in Challenges to Moral and Religious Belief: Disagreement and Evolution, edited by Michael Bergmann and Patrick Kain. Oxford University Press.
Pittard, John. 2015. “Religious Disagreement,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ISSN 2161-0002, http://www.iep.utm.edu/
Plantinga, Alvin. 2000. “Pluralism: A Defense of Religious Exclusivism.” Pp. 172-192 in The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity, edited by P. Quinn and K. Meeker. New York: Oxford University Press.