This chapter explores the implications of the new status of belief by reconsidering traditional arguments for the existence of God. If disbelief in the supernatural was not a live option before the appearance of modern secularity, what was the point of articulating proofs of God’s existence? This chapter shows that the so-called classical proofs performed a very different function to the one that they were later to assume, being more akin to spiritual exercises than logical arguments constructed from neutral premises. Crucially, one of the central ‘proofs’—that based on universal consensus—involved an appeal to the ubiquity and universality of religious belief. The demise of this ‘argument’ in the early modern period signalled a major change in how belief in the supernatural came to be understood, indicating that the burden of proof was shifting from unbelievers to believers. This was accompanied by a new conception of natural theology, understood as an enterprise that could provide support for religious belief on rational grounds alone. The changing status of natural theology and proofs for God’s existence correlated directly with the appearance of a new notion of belief and the requirements for its justification.

The key idea of Reformed Epistemology is that religious beliefs can be rational even if they are held noninferentially, without being based on arguments. The first part of this chapter clarifies in more detail what Reformed Epistemology says and how the view has evolved in three stages over the past forty years. The first stage was concerned with ground-clearing and initially characterizing the view; the second stage included book-length definitive statements of the view by William Alston and Alvin Plantinga. The third stage consists of twenty-first-century developments of the view, connecting it with, among other things, the cognitive science of religion, cognitively impacted experiences, epistemic intuition, and religious testimony. The second part of the chapter briefly presents three important objections to Reformed Epistemology – having to do with the need for independent confirmation, belief in the Great Pumpkin, and religious disagreement – and considers what can be said in response to them.

Faith in God conflicts with reason – or so we are told. This chapter focuses on two arguments for this conclusion. After evaluating three criticisms of them, we identify an assumption they share, namely that faith in God requires belief that God exists. Whether the assumption is true depends on what faith is. We sketch a theory of faith that allows for both faith in God without belief that God exists, and faith in God while in belief-cancelling doubt regarding God’s existence. We then argue that our theory, unlike the theory of Thomas Aquinas, makes sense of four central items of faith-data: (i) pístis in the Synoptics, (ii) ʾemunāh in the Hebrew scriptures, (iii) exemplars of faith in God, including Abraham, Jesus, and Mother Teresa, and (iv) the widespread experience of people of faith today. We close by assessing revisions of the two arguments we began with, revisions that align with our theory of faith, and find them dubious, at best.

Knowledge-first epistemology gives up the traditional project of defining knowledge in terms of necessary, sufficient, and informative conditions. Rather, the approach gives knowledge itself explanatory primacy within epistemology. This chapter explores two ideas that have been prominent among knowledge-first authors and considers their implications for religious epistemology. The first is to equate one’s evidence with one’s knowledge, or with some relevant subset of one’s knowledge. The second is to reverse the traditional order of explanation between knowledge and justified belief; that is, to explain justification in terms of knowledge rather than the other way around. These ideas, we argue, have interesting implications for a variety of issues in religious epistemology, including the nature of evidence (and defeating evidence) for theism, and the prospects for Public Reason Liberalism.

This chapter aims to lay out a map of the diverse epistemological perspectives within the Islamic theological tradition in the conceptual framework of contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. It seeks to consider the epistemological views in light of their historic context, while at the same time seeking to “translate” those broadly medieval perspectives in tandem with a set of contemporary positions in religious epistemology: theistic evidentialism, reformed epistemology, and fideism. The chapter is divided into two main sections designated for discussions of differing accounts found in distinct trends of the Islamic tradition, namely the Rationalist and Traditionalist trends within Islamic theology. The discussion within the Rationalist tradition focuses on the philosophical theologians (mutakallimūn), of the dominant Mu’tazilite (mu’tazila), Ash’arite (ash‘ariyya) and Maturidite schools (māturīdiyya). The section on Islamic Traditionalism focuses on the Atharite (atharī) scripturalism of Ibn Qudāma, and in suparticular the thought of Ibn Taymiyya.

This chapter concludes the argument of the book with a final comparison to Alvin Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology; challenges to theologians, philosophers, and biblical scholars; and suggests further avenues for research.