Volume 35, Issue 2, April 2018
Hamid Vahid
Pages 219-236
https://doi.org/10.5840/faithphil201832298
Religious Diversity
The Cognitive Penetrability of Religious Perception
Philosophical responses to religious diversity range from outright rejection of divine reality to claims of religious pluralism. In this paper, I challenge those responses that take the problem of religious diversity to be merely an instance of the general problem of disagreement. To do so, I will take, as my starting point, William Alston¡¯s treatment of the problems that religious diversity seems to pose for the rationality of theistic beliefs. My main aim is to highlight the cognitive penetrability of religious experience as a major source of such problems. I conclude by examining the consequences of cognitive penetration for the reliability of the monotheistic doxastic practice.