Are the members of echo chambers blameworthy for their beliefs? If we follow Sarah Stroud's account of friendship, we end up with the following conclusion: if echo chambers involve friendship, then the individuals have strong reasons not to live up to epistemic demands or ideals when the friendships are formed in the echo chambers they are members of. This result stands in striking contrast with the received view, according to which the members of echo chambers are blameworthy for their epistemic vices and faulty beliefs. The received view uses individual epistemic vices to propose individualistic solutions for the problem of echo chambers. I argue that this is misleading, simply because the members of echo chambers are not blameworthy due to the friendships cultivated in the echo chambers.

This article presents a novel argument against an application of evidential scientism to religious belief. In particular, our target is those arguments at whose core lies the claim that it ought to be the case that, if one holds religious beliefs, then those beliefs are based on the best scientific evidence. Moreover, rather than focussing on the philosophical puzzles that usually fall within the purview of philosophers of religion, we are interested in the mundane beliefs of ordinary believers about their everyday interactions with God. Our argument combines recent work on epistemic partiality in close personal relationships with insights from analytic theology on the personal nature of believer's relationships with God. We argue that it's inappropriate for believers who take themselves to have a personal relationship with God to base their religious beliefs about God's nature on scientific evidence. In particular, it's precisely because these believers are in a personal relationship with God that it's sometimes inappropriate for them to form their beliefs about God's nature on the basis of scientific evidence.