The Maturity of Belief Critically Assessing Religious Faith

by Lowery, Kevin Twain

• ISBN13: 9780826498533
• ISBN10: 0826498531
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-10-30
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Rather than abandon religious belief altogether, as some suggest, Kevin Lowery contends that the real problem is the intellectual immaturity with which religious beliefs are held.This book thus explores the nature and dynamics of religious belief, and it

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
How and Why We Believe	p. 7
The nature of belief	p. 9
Making sense of reality	p. 9
The desire to believe	p. 12
Reasons for believing	p. 15
Moving beyond simplistic beliefs	p. 18
Why people hold onto simplistic beliefs	p. 18
Reasons for embracing new concepts	p. 24
Exceptions	p. 26
The difficulty of replacing religious beliefs	p. 27
A familiar example	p. 30
Belief in Historical Perspective	p. 35
Religious belief before the Enlightenment	p. 37
The ancient mindset	p. 38
Plato and Aristotle	p. 39
The medieval period	p. 41
Scholasticism	p. 42
The Renaissance	p. 44
The Reformation	p. 44
The Early Enlightenment	p. 46
Rationalism	p. 47
Empiricism	p. 49
Metaphysical perspectives	p. 52
The burgeoning of the Enlightenment	p. 57
Kant	p. 57
Hegel	p. 60
Existentialism	p. 62
Pragmatism	p. 63
More recent developments	p. 68
Fundamentalism	p. 69
Logical positivism	p. 73
Postmodernism	p. 76
Conclusion	p. 77
Constructing Belief	p. 79
The basis of belief	p. 81
Truth	p. 81
Objectivity	p. 83
Reliability	p. 84
Justification	p. 85
Verification	p. 86
Knowledge	p. 88
Evidence	p. 91
Systematized belief	p. 93
Constructing paradigms	p. 93
Adapting paradigms	p. 95
Replacing paradigms	p. 96
Group dynamics	p. 97
Religious paradigms	p. 101
Sources of religious belief	p. 103
Subjective and objective sources	p. 103
The four sources	p. 105
Religious authority	p. 111
Scripture	p. 111
Tradition	p. 116
Orthodoxy	p. 119
Mature Belief	p. 121
Religious belief and certainty	p. 123
The desire for certainty	p. 123
Extremes to be avoided	p. 127
Naivete	p. 127
Scepticism	p. 129
Dogmatism	p. 131
Trust	p. 133
Certainty and doubt	p. 134
Faith and belief	p. 136
Faith and reason	p. 136
Reconciling the empirical with the metaphysical	p. 138
Characteristics of mature religious faith	p. 142
Cultivating religious intellectual maturity	p. 146
Types of religious intellectual immaturity	p. 146
Superstition	p. 146
Authoritarianism	p. 149
Emotionalism	p. 150
Dogmatism	p. 150
Safe havens for religious intellectual immaturity	p. 151
Rationalism	p. 151
Pragmatism	p. 153
Radical scepticism	p. 154
Steps towards religious intellectual maturity	p. 155
Deepening understanding	p. 155
Broadening perspective	p. 159
Accountability and mentoring	p. 160
Conclusion	p. 161
Recommended Reading	p. 163
Index	p. 167
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