The Right to Believe: Perspectives

in Religious Epistemology

An International Conference

Bydgoszcz, 7-9 September 2010

organized by

Dariusz Łukasiewicz, Institute of Philosophy, Kazimierz Wielki University, Poland

and

Roger Pouivet, Laboratoire d’Histoire des Sciences et de Philosophie-Archives Poincaré (University of Nancy/CNRS, France)

“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence", said the English philosopher and mathematician William Clifford. As such, he was arguing in direct opposition to religious thinkers for whom belief in things in spite of the lack of evidence for them was not a vice. He was famously attacked by pragmatist philosopher William James, in his "Will to Believe", defending the adoption of beliefs as hypotheses and self-fulfilling prophecies even without prior evidence of their truth. Their polemic inaugurated a debate over the right to believe. It reminds us that philosophers like Plato, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Newman, examined in a way akin to this debate the relation between faith and reason. Today many contemporary epistemologists entered into this debate, especially in the analytic tradition (Swinburne, Kenny, Plantinga, Wolterstorff, Zagzebski, and others), defending or contesting the requirement of evidence for justified belief, religious or not, and even discussing the epistemological value of this requirement of justification for our beliefs, religious or not.

This conference will address two questions. One is general: what do we have the right to believe? The second one is more particular: do we have the right to entertain religious beliefs? — i.e. beliefs in the existence of God, of course, but also, for example, in the resurrection of Christ, in miracles, in an afterlife? We need to ask the general question to check the epistemological concepts that are implicitly in use in the answers to the second one. The answers to the second question will often be a good way to put flesh on the often too abstract epistemological arguments. Philosophy of religion could be a very good domain to examine the validity of our epistemological intuitions or theories about what is a justified belief. So, the conference is at the intersection of epistemology and of the philosophy of religion: this is exactly what “Epistemology of Religious Beliefs” or “Religious Epistemology” is.

The languages of the conference will be English and Polish, and in the latter case an English version or extended abstract will be required.