Brian Leiter
speaker
530 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2009
last heard Sep 2010
Brian Leiter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And especially courts and legal scholars hate to go down, which is trying to say something about what's distinctive of religion and matters of religious conscience.
But it seems to me unavoidable for trying to answer the question that I've posed.
So my proposal is that we can think of religion, religious belief, as being distinguished by two characteristics.
And I think it's very important.
In this regard, not to tie it up with theism.
Because for one thing, and the courts have sometimes moved in this direction, but there are religions that are not theistic in the Judeo-Christian sense, right?
Yet surely they have to count as religions for purposes of figuring out what are matters of religious conscience.
So I suggest the distinctive features.
of religious belief are twofold.
On the one hand, in every religion there are some beliefs that are held to be, as I put it, insulated from reasons and evidence.
And by insulated from reasons and evidence, I mean insulated from the ordinary standards of reasons and evidence that we deploy in common sense and that we find in the sciences.
And I just accept the Quinian view that there's a continuity of epistemic standards between common sense and the sciences.
When I say that there are some beliefs that are part of any religion that are insulated from reasons and evidence, I'm trying to
capture the familiar idea that at some point in every religion there are some beliefs that are held on faith, right?
And so this is an attempt to cash out the notion of held-on faith means insulated from the standards of reasons and evidence that we would ordinarily bring to bear on beliefs before deciding whether it was worth holding them.
So that's one component.
But there's a second component which is, in my view, equally essential, namely that at least some of the beliefs in the religion are taken by the believer to impose categorical
demands upon action.
That is, things that the believer must do, come what may.
Now, it might arguably be a kind of as-if categoricity, right?
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