Challenges to Moral and Religious Belief Disagreement and Evolution

by Bergmann, Michael; Kain, Patrick

• ISBN13: 9780199669776
• ISBN10: 0199669775
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-07-22
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Challenges to Moral and Religious Belief contains fourteen original essays by philosophers, theologians, and social scientists on challenges to moral and religious belief from disagreement and evolution. Three main questions are addressed: Can one reasonably maintain one's moral and religious beliefs in the face of interpersonal disagreement with intellectual peers? Does disagreement about morality between a religious belief source, such as a sacred text, and a non-religious belief source, such as a society's moral intuitions, make it irrational to continue trusting one or both of those belief sources? Should evolutionary accounts of the origins of our moral beliefs and our religious beliefs undermine our confidence in their veracity? This volume places challenges to moral belief side-by-side with challenges to religious belief, sets evolution-based challenges alongside disagreement-based challenges, and includes philosophical perspectives together with theological and social science perspectives, with the aim of cultivating insights and lines of inquiry that are easily missed within a single discipline or when these topics are treated in isolation. The result is a collection of essays--representing both skeptical and non-skeptical positions about morality and religion--that move these discussions forward in new and illuminating directions.

Author Biography

Michael Bergmann is Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. In addition to numerous articles in epistemology and philosophy of religion in journals and edited volumes, he is author of Justification without Awareness (Clarendon Press, 2006) and co-editor of Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham (OUP, 2010).

Patrick Kain is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. He is a co-editor and contributor to Essays on Kant's Anthropology (CUP, 2003), and has published numerous articles in edited volumes and journals such as Journal of the History of Philosophy, Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie, Kantian Review, and Philosophy Compass.

Table of Contents

Challenges to Moral and Religious Belief: Overview and Future Directions, Michael Bergmann and Patrick Kain
I: Moral Disagreement and Religious Disagreement
1. Moral Disagreement among Philosophers, Ralph Wedgwood
2. Moral Disagreements with Psychopaths, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
3. Normative Disagreement as a Challenge to Moral Philosophy and Philosophical Theology, Robert Audi
4. Conciliationism and Religious Disagreement, John Pittard
II: Disagreement Between Religious and Nonreligious Sources of Moral Belief
5. Conscience and the Moral Epistemology of Divine Command Theory, John Hare
6. Theologies of Hell and Epistemological Conflict, Charles Mathewes
7. Not by "Reason" Alone, or Even First: The Priority of Sanctity over Dignity, Timothy Jackson
8. Toward God's Own Ethics, Mark C. Murphy
9. If Everything Happens for a Reason, Then We Don't Know What Reasons Are: Why the Price of Theism is Normative Skepticism, Sharon Street
III: Evolutionary Debunking of Moral and Religious Belief
10. Why an Evolutionary Perspective is Critical to Understanding Moral Behavior in Humans, Sarah F. Brosnan
11. Darwinian Normative Skepticism, Dustin Locke
12. Why There Is No Darwinian Dilemma for Ethical Realism, William J. FitzPatrick
13. Religion is More Than Belief: What Evolutionary Theories of Religion Tell Us about Religious Commitments, Richard Sosis and Jordan Kiper
14. Does the Scientific Study of Religion Cast Doubt on Theistic Beliefs?, Joshua C. Thurow