Is Religious Belief a Kind of Belief?

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Abstract (may include machine translation)

This paper discusses the familiar question of whether expressions of faith or conviction offered by religious believers really express their beliefs, in the standard sense of 'belief' used in philosophy and psychology. Some hold that these expressions do not express genuine beliefs because they do not meet the standards of rationality, coherence and integration which govern beliefs. So they must serve some other function. But this picture of 'genuine belief' is inadequate, for reasons independent of the phenomenon of religion. Once we get a better picture of belief, we can see that religious beliefs conform to this picture, and that typical expressions of faith really are expressions of belief in the proper sense.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)414-429
Number of pages16
JournalNeue Zeitschrift fur Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie
Volume65
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Nov 2023

Keywords

  • Religious belief
  • inferential integration
  • propositional attitudes
  • rationality
  • realism about beliefs

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