This paper seeks to explore the significance of a specific kind of religious experience for the rationality of religious belief. The context for this is a gap between what is often allowed as rational and what is embraced as certain in the life of faith. The claim to certainty at issue is related to the work and experience of the Holy Spirit; this experience has a structure which is explored phenomenologically. Thereafter various ways of cashing in the epistemic value of (...) the purported claim to certainty are examined. (shrink)

Book jacket/back: Although it is now widely held that the scientific basis for Sigmund Freud's theories is decidedly wobby, and his surmises often appear woefully incomplete at best, there yet remains an impression that Freud was a bold explorer of the mind's hidden depths, a penetrating if fallible discerner of unsuspected motives behind the superficially innocent forms of behavior. And if even that is now more frequently questioned, we are at least left with the consolation that Freud, however misguided, was (...) a man of unsported integrity, who sincerely strove to uncover the truth and accurately reported what his clients told him. Only a few writers have heretofore intimated the possibility that Freud's accounts of his cases are systematically and self servingly untruthful, but now Allen Esterson picks up the trail, and demonstrates, by acute detective work, that Freud's work cannot be relied upon. The notorious 'child seduction' incidents, which supposedly led to the framing of the fundamentals of psychoanalytic theory, have occasioned much controversy over the question whether Freud was right to consign these reminiscences of sexual molestations in infancy to the realm of fantasy. This dispute is entirely beside the point because, as Esterson shows, Freud's clients did not report memories of childhood molestation. Here as became habitual with him, Freud muddled his own conjectures of what was going on in his clients' unconscious with their accounts of what they remembered, and, over time, Freud came to represent the former as the latter. Esterson takes us through all the key published cases in Freud's cases in Freud's career, showing that Freud's reports are often at least strongly indicative of misrepresentation, and in some cases demonstrably misleading. Esterson's indictment builds irresistiby to a 'proof beyond reasonable doubt' that Freud's claim to rank as a major thinker is unfounded, and indeed quite preposterous, though his extraordinary achievement as persuader and rhetorician is unassailable. (shrink)

Long before the current dispute in the USA about the teaching of evolution, Hume's dialogues presented and critically analyzed the idea of intelligent design. What should we teach our children about the creation of the world? What should we teach them about religion? The characters Demea, Cleanthes, and Philo passionately present and defend different answers to that question. Demea opens the dialogue with a position derived from René Descartes and Father Malebranche — God's nature is a mystery, but God's existence (...) can be proved logically. Cleanthes attacks that view, both because it leads to mysticsm and because it attempts the impossible task of trying to establish existence on the basis of pure reason, without appeal to sense experience. As an alternative, he offers a proof of both God's existence and God's nature based on the same kind of scientific reasoning established by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. Taking a skeptical approach, Philo presents a series of arguments that question any attempt to use reason as a basis for religious faith. He suggests that human beings might be better off without religion. The dialolgue ends without genuine agreement among the characters, justifying Hume's choice of dialogue as the form of presentation. (shrink)