Recently there was a "substantive content change" to the Stanford Encyclopedia article "The Epistemology of Religion".
Since religious epistemology is my main thing, I can't resist a few opinions, but I'll put them below the fold.
Part of my problem with this article is that there are too many instances of the following words: hegemony, postmodern, Wittgenstein, etc. But I'll only comment further on specifics. He defines evidentialism as a belief is justified only if "it is proportioned to the evidence". Good enough for this bayesian evidentialist, but then things go awry.
A central focus of the article is the claim that "Evidentialism implies that it is not justified to have a full religious belief unless there is conclusive evidence for it." But he never carefully considers what it means to have "full religious belief" and I think this is a serious shortcoming as it is false on many interpretations.
For example if full religious belief means 100% confidence/0% doubt then we've got a useless conception of "full religious belief". But if "full religious belief" means ultimate commitment, then there's no reason why non-zero doubt would be a barrier. For if I desire union with God more than anything else then the expected utility of pursuing a religious way will survive almost any degree of doubt.
Such considerations render false his statement made while considering inductive natural theology: "While there are differences of approach, the common theme is that there is evidence for theism but evidence of a probable rather than a conclusive kind, justifying belief but not full belief."
Again, either "full belief" means 100% certainty--in which it's irrelevant--or it means something like ultimate commitment in which case it's relevant but false.
Later, when discussing Newman, he says "he qualified evidentialism by insisting that an implicit and cumulative argument could lead to justified certainty" but the kind of certainty here is a subtle matter and not easily identified with the kind of certainty an evidentialist would require conclusive evidence for (and even here "conclusive" is elusive: it can mean "sufficient for terminating active inquiry" in which case less-than-entailing certain evidence can suffice--or it can mean certain evidence which entails the conclusion).
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Technorati Tags: religious belief, stanford encyclopedia, religious epistemology, encyclopedia article, substantive content, central focus, bayesian, hegemony, wittgenstein, postmodern, resist