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Detachment, Rationality and Evidence: Towards a More Humane Religious Epistemology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2017
Abstract
Some truths cannot be accessed ‘cold’, from a detached and impersonal standpoint, but require personal commitment and even moral change in order for the relevant evidence to come to light. The truths of religion may be of this kind. Moreover, recent work in psychology and neurophysiology suggests that our knowledge of the world comes in different forms, the detached critical scrutiny associated with ‘the left-brain’ and the more intuitive and holistic awareness mediated by the ‘right brain’. Much contemporary philosophy privileges the former kind of knowledge, but in areas such as religion this may be a mistake.1
- Type
- Papers
- Information
- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 81: Religious Epistemology , October 2017 , pp. 87 - 100
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2017
References
1 A version of this paper was delivered at a conference on Religious Epistemology held at Heythrop College, University of London, in June 2015. I am grateful to the organizer, Stephen Law, and to participants for helpful discussion. The paper draws extensively on material from my How to Believe (London: Bloomsbury, 2015)Google ScholarPubMed.
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