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Why Would Anyone Believe in God?

Lanham MD: AltaMira Press (2004)

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  1. Reconsidering Taylor's Design Argument.Mehrzad Ali Moin - 2024 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 41 (2):143-163.
    Contemporary philosophers have largely neglected Richard Taylor’s design argument. Given that the initial responses to the argument were largely negative, one might be tempted to conclude that the argument is simply philosophically inadequate. This paper rejects that conclusion by showing how Taylor’s argument has been misunderstood by his critics. In defending Taylor, it is shown that the two types of objections levied against him fail to even blemish his design argument, let alone refute it. Consideration is also given to the (...)
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  • Non-belief as self-deception?Lari Launonen - 2024 - Religious Studies.
    The suppression thesis is the theological claim that theistic non-belief results from culpable mistreatment of one’s knowledge of God or one’s evidence for God. The thesis is a traditional one but unpopular today. This article examines whether it can gain new credibility from the philosophy of self-deception and from the cognitive science of religion. The thesis is analysed in terms of the intentionalist and the non-intentionalist model of self-deception. The first proposed model views non-belief as intentional suppression of one’s implicit (...)
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  • Massive Modularity: An Ontological Hypothesis or an Adaptationist Discovery Heuristic?David Villena - 2023 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 36 (4):317-334.
    Cognitive modules are internal mental structures. Some theorists and empirical researchers hypothesise that the human mind is either partially or massively comprised of structures that are modular in nature. Is the massive modularity of mind hypothesis a cogent view about the ontological nature of human mind or is it, rather, an effective/ineffective adaptationist discovery heuristic for generating predictively successful hypotheses about both heretofore unknown psychological traits and unknown properties of already identified psychological traits? Considering the inadequacies of the case in (...)
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  • Debunking Debunking: Explanationism, Probabilistic Sensitivity, and Why There is No Specifically Metacognitive Debunking Principle.David Bourget & Angela Mendelovici - 2023 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 47:25-52.
    On explanationist accounts of genealogical debunking, roughly, a belief is debunked when its explanation is not suitably related to its content. We argue that explanationism cannot accommodate cases in which beliefs are explained by factors unrelated to their contents but are nonetheless independently justified. Justification-specific versions of explanationism face an iteration of the problem. The best account of debunking is a probabilistic account according to which subject S’s justification J for their belief that P is debunked when S learns that (...)
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  • Pascal Boyer's Miscellany of Homunculi: A Wittgensteinian Critique of Religion Explained.Robert Vinten - 2023 - In Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion: Interpreting Human Nature and the Mind. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 39-52.
    In Pascal Boyer’s book Religion Explained inference systems are made to do a lot of work in his attempts to explain cognition in religion. These inference systems are systems in the brain that produces inferences when they are activated by things we perceive in our environment. According to Boyer they perceive things, produce explanations, and perform calculations. However, if Wittgenstein’s observation, that “only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it (...)
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  • The Pregnancy Rescue Case: why abortion is immoral.Perry Hendricks - 2024 - Journal of Medical Ethics 50 (5):332-334.
    In cases in which we must choose between either (i) preventing a woman from remaining unwillingly pregnant or (ii) preventing a fetus from being killed, we should prevent the fetus from being killed. But this suggests that in typical cases abortion is wrong: typical abortions involve preventing a woman from remaining unwillingly pregnant over preventing a fetus from being killed. And so abortion is typically wrong—and this holds whether or not fetuses are persons.
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  • Naturalism and Naturalness: A Naturalist's Perspective.Graham Oppy - 2018 - In Paul Copan & Charles Taliaferro (eds.), The Naturalness of Belief: New Essays on Theism's Reasonability. Lanham: Lexington Books. pp. 3-16.
    This chapter is an invited contribution to a book on the naturalness of theistic belief. I start by considering ordinary usage of the term 'natural'. I then clarify how I shall use the terms 'naturalism', 'theism', 'worldview' and 'big picture'. I consider the demographic spread of commitment to theistic big pictures and naturalistic big pictures. I consider the distribution of happiness over those committed to theistic big pictures and naturalistic big pictures. I consider the distribution of reasons over those committed (...)
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  • Animisms: Practical Indigenous Philosophies.Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz - 2022 - In Tiddy Smith (ed.), Animism and Philosophy of Religion. Springer Verlag. pp. 95-122.
    In this chapter, we focus on animism and how it is studied in the cognitive science of religion and cultural anthropology. We argue that philosophers of religion still use (outdated) normative notions from early scientific studies of religion that go back at least a century and that have since been abandoned in other disciplines. Our argument is programmatic: we call for an expansion of philosophy of religion in order to include traditions that are currently underrepresented. The failure of philosophy of (...)
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  • Introduction.Diego E. Machuca - 2023 - In Evolutionary Debunking Arguments: Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Mathematics, Metaphysics, and Epistemology. New York: Routledge. pp. 1-12.
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  • (1 other version)Hiddenness of God.Daniel Howard-Snyder & Adam Green - 2016 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    “Divine hiddenness”, as the phrase suggests, refers, most fundamentally, to the hiddenness of God, i.e., the alleged fact that God is hidden, absent, silent. In religious literature, there is a long history of expressions of annoyance, anxiety, and despair over divine hiddenness, so understood. For example, ancient Hebrew texts lament God’s failure to show up in experience or to show proper regard for God’s people or some particular person, and two Christian Gospels portray Jesus, in his cry of dereliction on (...)
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  • The epistemology of religion.Peter Forrest - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Contemporary epistemology of religion may conveniently be treated as adebate over whether evidentialism applies to thebelief-component of religious faith, or whether we should insteadadopt a more permissive epistemology. Here evidentialism is theinitially plausible position that a belief is justified only if``it is proportioned to the evidence''. For example, supposea local weather forecaster has noticed that over the two hundred yearssince records began a wetter than average Winter is followed in 85% ofcases by a hotter than average Summer. Then, assuming for (...)
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  • Nic nadzwyczajnego. Wielki fakt wiary i jego naturalistyczne wyjaśnienie.Stanisław Ruczaj - 2023 - Roczniki Filozoficzne 71 (4):131-147.
    In his book Między ukryciem a jawnością [Between Hiddenness and Openness] (2023), Professor Jacek Wojtysiak argues that on the assumption of atheistic naturalism, no convincing explanation can be given for the ‘great fact of faith,’ that is, the phenomenon of the historical persistence and universality of the belief in the existence of God. The purpose of this paper is to challenge this thesis. Drawing on selected theories from the field of the Cognitive Science of Religion, I sketch a naturalistic explanation (...)
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  • Seeking the Supernatural: The Interactive Religious Experience Model.Neil Van Leeuwen & Michiel van Elk - 2019 - Religion, Brain and Behavior 9 (3):221-275.
    [OPEN ACCESS TARGET ARTICLE WITH COMMENTARIES AND RESPONSE] We develop a new model of how human agency-detection capacities and other socio-cognitive biases are involved in forming religious beliefs. Crucially, we distinguish general religious beliefs (such as *God exists*) from personal religious beliefs that directly refer to the agent holding the belief or to her peripersonal time and space (such as *God appeared to _me_ last night*). On our model, people acquire general religious beliefs mostly from their surrounding culture; however, people (...)
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  • (1 other version)Philosophy of religion.Charles Taliaferro - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • The imaginary inner inside the cognitive science of religion.Christopher Hoyt - 2023 - In Robert Vinten (ed.), Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion: Interpreting Human Nature and the Mind. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 73-91.
    Scientists working on the cognitive science of religion (CSR) are eager to have us believe that they have recently uncovered the unconscious origins of religious beliefs and practices. Though their theories differ in detail, CSR researchers generally agree that religion is the product of faculties of mind that evolved to serve our adaptive needs, but which sometimes produce the false beliefs and incoherent practices of religious life. Pascal Boyer, a leading figure and a reasonable representative of the mode of thinking (...)
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  • (1 other version)Religion and science.Alvin Plantinga - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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