Theism and infallibilism: a marriage made in heaven?

Abstract

Many philosophers ardently subscribe to what can be called the doctrine of public-world fallibilism (DPWF), i.e. the doctrine that human persons can never have infallible awareness of the truth of propositions such as that expressed by the sentence ‘There is an olive on the kitchen floor’. It has, of course, been standard to contrast such claims with epistemically tentative first-person phenomenological reports, e.g. ‘It seems to me that there is olive on the kitchen floor’. According to the DPWF, for any public-world proposition p and person N who accepts that p, there is always some epistemic possibility (it may, of course, be quite small) that N is mistaken about p. I hope to establish – in something of a Cartesian spirit – that there is eminently respectable warrant for maintaining that theism requires the falsity of the DPWF. Further, I believe that this thesis can be seen to have far more epistemological significance than might initially be supposed.