Belief and the Logic of Religious Commitment

Belief and Rationality In recent years deep questions have been raised not only about what constitutes rational justification for religious beliefs, but also about the relevance of standard notions of justification to the analysis of a believer’s relation to her beliefs. Indeed, the net tendency of the Anglo-American discussion since (roughly) 1983 has been to say that religious persons can be entitled to believe a set of religious propositions, and to do so with strong subjective certainty, even while lacking the sort of intersubjective grounds that many philosophers in the past took to be necessary. One prominent expression of this tendency has been the claim that (some) religious beliefs are “properly basic,” requiring no support beyond the disposition of a properly functioning mind to hold them. Another is the argument that there is a 1