The Inaccessibility of Religion Problem

Abstract

Call agents who do not have religious faith or belief but find some religious ways of life highly attractive on broadly practical grounds "religious inquirers." These agents find themselves in a difficult position. On the one hand, there are epistemic norms that enjoin us to be conscientious in our believings. religious inquirers hold that conforming to these norms does not license having religious beliefs: there are simply too many evidential impediments to having such beliefs. On the other hand, there are norms that emanate from within the religious traditions themselves that speak against engaging in a religious way of life in order to enjoy its considerable goods by doing such things as playing the role of a believer or going through the ritualistic motions. instead, these norms seem to call for genuine faith. These two sets of norms generate the inaccessibility of religion problem (or the "inaccessibility problem," for short). The problem is that there are goods intrinsic to the theistic religious traditions that religious inquirers find both valuable and attractive but are accessible only by flouting norms of either epistemic or religious conduct. in this essay, i propose a solution to the inaccessibility problem. i maintain that there is an attitude-receptivity to the experience of God-that enables religious inquirers to enjoy a wide range of the goods internal to a religious tradition but without violating either external epistemic norms or internal religious ones.

In defence of partial faith

“…The division I propose is meant to grasp the intuitive difference between the people with an attitude normally associated with religion (full-blown faith) and two kinds of people which do not fit this description. One kind (partial faith) is constituted by those who have some receptivity to God, in the sense that someone who is receptive ‘finds the prospect of being the subject of some state or event attractive in some respect but is neither firmly convinced that he should be nor is irresistibly drawn to being the subject of that state and event’ (Cuneo (2017), 673), where the source of the attraction can be cognitive or conative, and the other kind (lack of faith) is constituted by those who do not have any such receptivity 4…”