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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Insofar as the categoricity is tied to the idea of reward in the afterlife or something.
That doesn't matter for my purposes.
The point is the believer here and now in this world experiences the demands as demands that must be conformed with.
And it's that special conjunction, namely, of beliefs insulated from ordinary standards of reasons and evidence, and some of which are experienced as imposing categorical demands on action, that I take to be distinctive of religion.
And of course it also explains the second part in particular explains why religion comes into conflict with the law.
Because the law says you can and can't do various kinds of things, and sometimes it says you can and can't do things that the religious believer feels they absolutely must or must not do, right?
And so this is why the conflicts arise.
You know, it's worth saying, right, a clearly a lot of religious belief in practice is what you might call casual, right?
But the thing about casual religious belief in practice is that it shouldn't possibly
pose the tough legal problems about liberty of conscience.
Because the casual believer doesn't necessarily take the religion as imposing categorical demands on action.
Therefore, the casual believer is less likely to get run into these conflicts with the law, right?
Casual believer will just yield because after all their version of religion is
you know, celebrate two or three religious holidays a year and that's about all it amounts to, right?
Make grandma happy.
So on the first one, as I discuss in uh in one of the papers, and your example is a nice one of this this problem, right, there are what you might call intellectualist traditions in religious thought, right, in which the attempt is made to show that religious belief in fact answers to ordinary standards of reasons and evidence.
Own time, I think the best known contemporary form of this is the debate about intelligent design.
That is the strategy of argument deployed by the proponents of intelligent design is to say it's not a religious hypothesis in the sense of being a hypothesis insulated from standards and evidence.
It's actually a hypothesis that is supposed to follow from the standards that the biologists themselves recognize.
Right.
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