Matthew A Benton Seattle Pacific University

Many have also elevated contentious secondary views untested by a broader or more conscientious examination of what all Christians share. Then they often want to assess who is aligned with them and malign who is against them. It also shows the value of being charitable toward someone’s argument even if they reach a conclusion you disagree with. You can sometimes agree their reasoning is well structured but still disagree with one of their starting points, their premises. “Evil, Hell, and Evidence for God at a Christian College,” interview with Dan Koch, You Have Permission podcast, Nov. 2019.

SPU Facts

Related and earlier topics include assertion, hedging, predictions, fallibilism, defeat, knowledge norms, and the epistemology of religion. My research has been supported by recent grants on knowledge and God, and on the philosophy of honesty through the Honesty Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation. He writes at the intersection of Epistemology, Ethics, and Language.

One pattern we see a lot is certain Christians, even some leaders, dismissing others as not really Christians if they don’t share their core values or policy ideas. There are no easy solutions to counter this, but I try to impart to my students in daily classroom discussions that it’s OK to carefully and charitably disagree. Doing so helps them become more comfortable with different ideas. Also, they can see the fruit of treating others with respect and can even end up learning from them.

chapters in books; handbook articles; encyclopedia article

Or, we might downgrade the evidence as less important, perhaps not even as evidence against our view. Something similar can happen with ideas which may not involve relationships, but which are nevertheless very dear to us. Politicians argued about climate change, and individual Americans clashed over everything from masking requirements to vaccine mandates. Despite the presumably unifying power of faith, even those in church pews across America couldn’t find common ground on most of these issues.

§2 considers our knowledge of God and God’s knowledge of us, and compares interpersonal knowledge with important work by Eleonore Stump on “Franciscan” knowledge. §3 examines how interpersonal knowledge may figure in liturgical practice, diffusing the problem of divine hiddenness, and motivating a novel understanding of divine love. Finally, §4 explores the possibility of epistemic injustice arising from dismissal or neglect of our religious testimony to one another, or of divine testimony to humanity, focusing specifically on the import of interpersonal knowledge. Epistemologists rarely take up this question, though recent developments make such inquiry possible and desirable.

Thus, leveraging the insights informing the maxim of Quality actually provides the resources for a distinctive positive case that knowledge is the constitutive norm of assertion. Some people are very good at accommodating divergent views and can remain friendly even while debating difficult topics. Those who are best at this tend to do it with a lot of humility and by practicing and seeing the good in others’ perspectives, even The Idea String if they don’t share them.

In other cases, we might hold back because we’re not sure which version of ourselves to put forward, or perhaps we’re still figuring out who we really are or what we think about some controversial matter. In still other cases, we might go along with what others say to experience a sense of belonging, perhaps acting like we agree and are on their side, even though we disagree or feel like it would be too much to ask tough questions of them. Many Christians have not considered what, at a minimum, makes one a Christ-follower.

Friends University

If knowledge is sensitive to practical stakes, then whether one knows depends in part on the practical costs of being wrong. When considering religious belief, the practical costs of being wrong about theism may differ dramatically between the theist (if there is no God) and the atheist (if there is a God). This paper explores the prospects, on pragmatic encroachment, for knowledge of theism (even if true) and of atheism (even if true), given two types of practical costs, namely by holding a false belief, and by missing out on a true belief. These considerations set up a more general puzzle of epistemic preference when faced with the choice between two beliefs, only one of which could become knowledge. Many epistemologists are enamored with a defeat condition on knowledge.

We aim to dispel some confusions about these notions, in particular by clarifying their roles within a probabilistic epistemology. In addition, we develop new responses to the problem of evil from both the phenomenal conception of evidence and the knowledge-first view of evidence. When we uncover strong disagreements, how best to proceed is probably dependent on the people, one’s relationships with them, and the circumstances of the discussion. The Honesty Project is a three-year project based at Wake Forest University and Carnegie Mellon University, supported by a $4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation. It aims to support new research and collaboration on the science and philosophy of honesty, particularly to discern what honesty is, and what its moral and intellectual consequences are. Christians would do better to focus on what essentials unify us, and then to display humility and respectful dialogue in the areas where we can reasonably disagree.

This is why so many people, especially in recent decades, seem stuck in echo chambers where they mainly listen to or read news sources which spin things the way they prefer and dismiss all other sources or views before even giving them a hearing. The Knowledge Norm or Knowledge Account of Assertion (KAA) has received added support recently from data on prompting assertion (John Turri 2010) and from a refinement suggesting that assertions ought to express knowledge (John Turri 2011). This paper adds another argument from parenthetical positioning, and then argues that KAA’s unified explanation of some of the earliest data adduced in its favor recommends KAA over its rivals. I argue here that they are not true counterexamples at all, a point that can be agreed upon even by those who reject KAA. The standard view is that prediction is individuated by the fact that it is the unique speech act that requires future-directed content. We then lay out several other potential strategies for individuating prediction, including the sort of view we favor.