In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pragmatic Aspects of Kantian TheismSami PihlströmI. IntroductionIs there a god? What do we, and what should we, mean by this question? How, if at all, might the question, given that its meaning(s) can be clarified, be settled or even rationally discussed? Is there any chance for a reasonable, scientifically minded person to believe in the reality of God, or is atheism the only intellectually responsible option for us today? (...) Is theism inevitably committed to the pseudoscientific absurdities of creationism, the "intelligent design theory," and other unfortunately increasingly influential fundamentalisms?The purpose of this article is not to solve these issues in the philosophy of religion. Nor will I engage in the science vs. religion controversy in any detail. I do, however, hope to illuminate the traditional issue of theism1 from a specific philosophical perspective. The kind of questions listed above help to describe the problem framework we are entering, as well as the sidetracks to be avoided in serious philosophy of religion (e.g., the debate between creationism and Darwinism, which is hardly scientifically interesting).2 Furthermore, my remarks will not be restricted to the opposition between theism and atheism3 as such. The metalevel contrast between evidentialism and fideism opens up another basic dispute in the modern debate over theism, perhaps even more important philosophically than the theism vs. atheism dispute itself, as it concerns the criteria in terms of which the latter dispute is to be adjudicated, and the kind of reasons that may be invoked to support (or attack) theism.4 It seems to me, for reasons that will properly emerge in due course, that there is a desperate need for a middle ground or synthesis between these two extremes in contemporary philosophy of religion, and the [End Page 110] present article will go some way toward providing such a synthesis by redescribing the problem of theism in Kantian (and to some extent pragmatist) terms. In short, evidentialism is, in most cases, inadequate as an interpretation of religious people's views on God, because religious faith needs no rational (religiously neutral) evidence, and can be neither defended nor criticized in terms of such "scientific" evidence. Religion, in short, is a human practice quite different from science, and though it may be related to science in various ways-that is, it is not completely "autonomous" and self-standing-it cannot be adequately evaluated by means of criteria internal to scientific practices. Fideism, in turn, is highly problematic, because it tends to lead to relativist and irrational views by sharply distinguishing between faith and reason and advancing the view that reason has no role at all to play in religious issues. Fideism sees science and religion as too autonomous from each other, while the evidentialist's error is the opposite one.5The proposal I will explore and (with some reservations) defend in the following inquiry is a reconceptualization of the theism vs. atheism and evidentialism vs. fideism issues in an explicitly ethical manner-though obviously only some selected perspectives on such an enormous task can be taken up in a single article. Indeed, both evidentialism and fideism, arguably, turn out to be insufficiently ethical responses to the problem of theism vs. atheism. The traditional alternatives themselves-that is, theism and atheism, when characterized as opposed metaphysical standpoints regarding the question of God's existence-suffer from the same insufficiency. Philosophical debates over these matters have unfortunately often ignored the ethical, hence pragmatic, aspects of the problem of God's existence; or, more precisely, philosophers of religion have traditionally been interested only in the ethical implications theism (or atheism) might have, instead of considering whether theism (or atheism) might itself be grounded in ethical premises, or whether such metaphysical issues might in the end be inevitably entangled with ethical ones. It is to these ethical issues at the heart of the theism debate that I suggest we should turn our attention. This suggestion, as we will see, amounts to a Kantian-and pragmatist-rearticulation of what the question is ultimately about. However, while Immanuel Kant's doctrine of the "postulates of practical reason" and William James's pragmatist defense of the legitimacy of... (shrink)

Sometimes the cognitive part of the human mind is modelled in a simplified way by degrees of belief. E.g., in philosophy of science and in formal epistemology agents are often identified by their credences in a set of claims. This line of dealing with the individual mind is currently expanded to groups by attempts of finding adequate ways of pooling individual degrees of belief into an overall group credence or, more abstractly speaking, into a collective mind. In this paper, we (...) model religious people’s minds as such a collective mind. Religious people are therein identified with a set of degrees of beliefs containing religious and secular credences. E.g., within a religious context a person may be sure that some statement is true, whereas the same person lacks non-religious support for such a credence and hence may doubt the truth of that statement within a secular context. We will also present two results on the adequacy of this model. (shrink)

This paper investigates Wittgenstein's remarks on happiness and harmony in the context of Wittgensteinian antitheodicy. Philosophers of religion inspired by Wittgenstein's philosophy often criticize theodicies seeking to justify apparently meaningless evil and suffering within God's overall harmonious plan. The paper analyses Wittgenstein's early views on happiness as harmony with the world, examining whether they are incompatible with an antitheodicist approach abandoning the very project of theodicy by acknowledging a certain kind of disharmony. However, antitheodicy may also, at the transcendental meta-level, (...) be considered a “harmonious” way of “seeing the world aright,” which raises a reflexive problem for any Wittgenstein-inspired antitheodicy. (shrink)