Religious Diversity and Disagreement

Abstract

Where liberal societies provide freedoms concerning speech, religious belief, or other matters of personal conscience, disagreement inevitably follows. Yet even where disagreement reigns, there is no shortage of confidence on any side. To some philosophers, confidence in the face of disagreement is at worst irrational and dubiously dogmatic; and at best, such confidence may only be had by conscientiously reckoning with the fact that a great many highly intelligent and well-read individuals—people whom one would regard as at least one’s intellectual peers—have reached opposing conclusions. How one must reckon with such disagreement is hotly debated among epistemologists. I don’t intend to settle such matters here. This essay offers an overview of how philosophers have approached problems of disagreement, with a special focus on religious diversity and disagreement. By the end I shall discuss some novel considerations that seem distinctive of religious inquiry, and which complicate the application of prominent views in the epistemology of disagreement.