In Defence of Agatheism: Clarifying a Good-Centred Interpretation of Religious Pluralism

Abstract

Two years ago, responding to B. Thornhill-Miller’s and P. Millican’s (later TMM) Humean-style critique of ‘first-order religious belief ’ (i.e., adherence to any particular religious tradition) as unavoidably irrational in the face of religious diversity and deliverances of empirical sciences,1 I enunciated a new pluralistic interpretation of first-order religious belief capable of accommodating the epistemological challenge of religious diversity and also immune to falsification by any future science, since grounded in the human axiological consciousness.2 I termed such axiologically grounded religious belief ‘agatheism’, since I stipulated that agatheistic belief identifies God, the Absolute or the ultimate reality religiously conceived with the ultimate good that must be postulated — as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Kant et al. agree — as the ultimate end of all human agency and thus an explanation of its irreducibly teleological character and a source of its meaning. My reply to TMM’s concern about irrationality of doxastic commitment to a particular religious tradition boiled down to a suggestion that to the extent the fundamental agatheistic religious belief is presupposed in such tradition as its doxastic core, its belief system — if internally coherent and aligned with a