Conciliationist Approach to the Challenge of Religious Disagreement

Abstract

Conciliationists believe that after the emergence of disagreement between epistemic peers, one cannot reasonably be committed to her previous belief or her degree of confidence in that. From this viewpoint, reasonable doxastic attitude in confronting disagreement is suspension of judgment or reducing the degree of confidence in the previous belief. Religious conciliationists believe that religious diversity challenges the justification of religious believes so that the reasonable epistemic response is to suspend the judgment till finding some appropriate evidence that demonstrates the advantage of one position over the other, or to reduce the level of confidence in God’s existence/ non-existence to the extent that disagreement disappears and the two parties come close together. They hold that the two parties should be in such a position, unless one of them achieve some preferred evidence that raises her level of confidence close to belief. There are three serious objections to conciliationism: easy justification, skepticism, and self-contradictoriness. So, if they have to demonstrate their view, Conciliationists should inevitably answer these objections. In this paper, I will argue that none of their answers is acceptable.

Keywords

• conciliationism
• steadfast view
• higher-order defeater
• equal weight view
• independence principle