Some notes on religion and democratic liberty

Philosophy & Rhetoric , 2014

Reason, religion, and public culture have been of significant interest recently, with critics reevaluating modernity’s conception of secularism and calling for a “post secular” public discourse. Simultaneously, one sees rising religious fundamentalisms and a growing style of antirationalism in public debate. These conditions make a reconceptualization of public reason necessary. The main goals of this article are to establish agnostic public reason as the conceptual guide and normative ethic for public debate in liberal democracies by considering the secular/religious reason boundary explicitly and to argue that this ethic of public reason requires a commitment to reason giving and a particular epistemic attitude but that it does not, nor should it, take precedence over first-order judgments. An ethics of citizenship based on the process of reason giving with the appropriate epistemic stance might be one step toward rectifying the problem of an increasing separation between enclave publics, even if, by design, it cannot solve fundamental disagreement.

Ars Disputandi

This article attempts to present a typology for evaluating religious truth claims in light of epistemological and metaphysical categories. Beginning with a distinction between "strong" and "weak" epistemological and metaphysical categories, it argues that a strong metaphysical set of beliefs need not be rooted in strong epistemological claims in order to be valid. Rather, it is possible to ground a "strong" set of metaphysical assertions within a "weak" epistemological framework, which, within its own framework, may be viewed to be presumptively true. Such a position, the article concludes, has the potential to provide a valid grounding for religious beliefs while allowing room for discourse across belief systems in a pluralistic society.

The Court of Reason, 2022

In this paper, I unpack Kant’s oft-cited and overstated declaration, “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith,” in relation to his account of rational faith in the “Orientation” essay and his defense of freedom in the final section of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In the “Orientation” essay, Kant translates faith in God into a rationally acceptable assumption, an orienting belief. This allows us to understand how in the Groundwork, at the “extreme boundary” of practical philosophy, Kant transforms freedom itself into a matter of faith, i.e., a necessary presupposition and orienting idea. Faith, thus altered, becomes a key weapon in Kant’s critical arsenal as he mounts a full-scale defense of freedom against the moral skeptic.

2015

Historically, the scientific dynamism of the classical Islamic society stands as a challenge to the notion that religion and science are inherently approved.

2009

The public/private split lies at the heart of classical liberalism.1 One of its main tenets is that religion be confined to the private sphere so that the sphere of public reason can proceed peacefully. However, recent developments in philosophical conceptions of reason challenge the supposed neutrality of the public sphere and thereby call into question the viability of the public- private split. These consequences cry out for a re-examination of the proper roles of reason and religion in a re-conceived sphere of ‘public’ reason. In this paper, I will begin by arguing for the notion of presuppositional reason, with support from Dooyeweerd, Derrida, and Quine (Section I). Having made my case for the presuppositional nature of reason, I will then argue that it requires some set of beliefs at its core that function ‘religiously’, thereby challenging the supposed neutrality of the secular state (Section II). Without the neutrality of the secular state, the divisions between church and state and private and public that this neutrality makes possible are called into question. In the next section, then, I will suggest a new, testimonial function of reason and religion that can operate in a re- conceived notion of the ‘public’ sphere that gets beyond the myth of neutrality (Section III). Finally, I will end by showing how the testimonial differs from Habermas’ liberal conception of the role of self-reflexive religion in the public sphere, and how the position I put forward in this paper is therefore distinct from liberalism (Section IV).

A novel account of the rationality of religious belief is offered, called quasi- fideism. According to this proposal, we are neither to think of religious belief as completely immune to rational evaluation nor are we to deny that it involves fundamental commitments which are arational. Moreover, a parity argument is presented to the effect that religious belief is no different from ordinary rational belief in presupposing such fundamental arational commitments. This proposal is shown to be rooted in Wittgenstein’s remarks on hinge commitments in On Certainty, remarks which it is claimed were in turn influenced by John Henry Newman’s treatment of the rationality of religious belief in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent.

The Cambridge Companion to Religious Epistemology , 2022

Faith in God conflicts with reason—or so we’re told. We focus on two arguments for this conclusion. After evaluating three criticisms of them, we identify an assumption they share, namely that faith in God requires belief that God exists. Whether the assumption is true depends on what faith is. We sketch a theory of faith that allows for both faith in God without belief that God exists, and faith in God while in belief-cancelling doubt God’s existence. We then argue that our theory, unlike the theory of Thomas Aquinas, makes sense of four central items of faith-data: (i) pístis in the Synoptics, (ii) ʾemunāh in the Hebrew scriptures, (iii) exemplars of faith in God, including Abraham, Jesus, and Mother Teresa, and (iv) the widespread experience of people of faith today. We close by assessing revisions of the two arguments we began with, revisions that align with our theory of faith, and find them dubious, at best.