Rationality and Religious Commitment

by Audi, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780199609574
• ISBN10: 0199609578
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-11-10
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Rationality and Religious Commitmentshows how religious commitment can be rational and describes the place of faith in the postmodern world. It portrays religious commitment as far more than accepting doctrines--it is viewed as a kind of life, not just as an embrace of tenets. Faith is conceived as a unique attitude. It is irreducible to belief but closely connected with both belief and conduct, and intimately related to life's moral, political, and aesthetic dimensions. Part One presents an account of rationality as a status attainable by mature religious people--even those with a strongly scientific habit of mind. Part Two describes what it means to have faith, how faith is connected with attitudes, emotions, and conduct, and how religious experience may support it. Part Three turns to religious commitment and moral obligation and to the relation between religion and politics. It shows how ethics and religion can be mutually supportive even though ethics provides standards of conduct independently of theology. It also depicts the integrated life possible for the religiously committed--a life with rewarding interactions between faith and reason, religion and science, and the aesthetic and the spiritual. The book concludes with two major accounts. One explains how moral wrongs and natural disasters are possible under God conceived as having the knowledge, power, and goodness that make such evils so difficult to understand. The other account explores the nature of persons, human and divine, and yields a conception that can sustain a rational theistic worldview even in the contemporary scientific age.

Author Biography

Robert Audi is John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of many books, including Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character (OUP, 1997), The Architecture of Reason: The Structure and Substance of Rationality (OUP, 2001), Moral Value and Human Diversity (OUP, 2007), Business Ethics and Ethical Business (OUP, 2009), and Democratic Authority and the Separation of Church and State (OUP, forthcoming in 2011).

Table of Contents

Preface	p. x
Acknowledgments	p. xiv
Four Epistemological Standards: Rationality and Reasonableness, Justification and Knowledge
Rationality in Thought and Action	p. 3
The contours of rationality	p. 6
Rationality and reasons: theoretical and practical	p. 10
The practical authority of theoretical reason	p. 13
Rationality and its experiential grounds	p. 16
Rationality, reasoning, and responsiveness to experience	p. 20
Justification, Knowledge, and Reasonableness	p. 24
Rationality and justification	p. 24
Rationality as normatively more permissive than justification	p. 29
Justification and knowledge	p. 34
Reasonableness	p. 39
Rationality and reasonableness in the aesthetic domain	p. 40
The normative appraisal of religious commitments	p. 43
The Dimensions of Rational Religious Commitment
Belief, Faith, Acceptance, and Hope	p. 51
The nature and varieties of faith	p. 52
Conditions for rational faith: a preliminary sketch	p. 66
Fiducial faith	p. 68
Acceptance	p. 80
Faith, belief, and hope: some normative contrasts	p. 84
The Diversity of Religious Commitment	p. 89
Religious commitment in the context of existential narratives	p. 89
Attitudinal and volitional elements in religious commitments	p. 92
Institutional aspects of religious conduct	p. 96
Degrees of religious commitment	p. 99
Experiential and Pragmatic Aspects of Religious Commitments	p. 105
Religious experiences as possible support for theism	p. 107
Perceptual religious experiences	p. 112
The normative authority of religious experience	p. 117
The pragmatic dimension of support for religious commitment	p. 125
The doxastic practice approach to defending the rationality of theism	p. 129
Religious experience, fiducial attitudes, and religious conduct	p. 131
Religion, Theology, and Morality
Religious Commitment and Moral Obligation	p. 137
Divine command ethics	p. 138
Divine commandedness versus divine commandability	p. 142
Divine commandability, obligation, and the good	p. 151
The autonomy of ethics and the moral authority of God	p. 153
Religiously grounded conduct	p. 160
Religious Integration and Human Flourishing	p. 165
The scope of religious integration	p. 166
Sociopolitical aspects of religious integration	p. 171
Natural theology and the obligations of citizenship	p. 174
Theism and the scientific habit of mind	p. 181
The aesthetic dimension of religious commitment	p. 184
The Rationality of Religious Commitment in the Postmodern World
Internal Challenges to the Rationality of Religious Commitment	p. 191
The divine attributes	p. 192
Pluralism, defeasibility, and rationality	p. 197
Rational religious disagreement, skepticism, and humility	p. 201
The Problem of Evil	p. 205
A conception of the problem of evil	p. 205
The axiology of good and evil	p. 209
A theocentric versus a cosmocentric approach to the problem	p. 214
Moral evil in a world under God	p. 219
Theological choiceworthiness	p. 228
Natural evil	p. 231
Dimensions of divine knowledge	p. 240
The Challenge of Naturalism	p. 247
Philosophical naturalism	p. 247
Scientific explanation and cosmological perplexity	p. 250
Personhood, mental substance, and embodiment	p. 253
The possibility of divine embodiment	p. 257
Mental causation and mentalistic explanation	p. 264
Causation, causal explanation, and causal power	p. 270
The causal closure versus the causal sufficiency of the physical world	p. 276
Intellectual economy and the scientific approach to the world	p. 281
Conclusion	p. 286
References	p. 297
Index	p. 307
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