Religious Belief and Intellectual Autonomy

Abstract

Intellectual autonomy indicates how human being can preserve her epistemic agency and intellectually manage and regulate herself. This epistemic value is commonly proposed against intellectual heteronomy according to which the believer is not capable of applying her epistemic agency because of internal or external impediments. Since the early modern era, some philosophers and intellectuals have supposed, implicitly or explicitly, that religious belief violates intellectual autonomy. However, the responsibilist version of virtue epistemology shows that autonomy, as an intellectual virtue, is not epistemic self-reliance and independence from the other but prescribes a way to regulate one’s epistemic agency in intellectual interactions with the other. On this basis, a conscientious autonomous believer is capable of knowing and managing the variety of her epistemic relations with others. Intellectual autonomy in this sense is compatible with believing and maintaining religious beliefs. Religious belief can be autonomous if the believer (i) find the other’s role in her beliefs as imparting knowledge, critic, model, adherent, and authority and (ii) regulate, conscientiously and equipped with intellectual virtues, the way in which the other participates in them.

Keywords

• autonomy
• epistemic authority
• virtue epistemology
• intellectual virtue
• religious belief