The Philosophy of Religion: A Programmatic Overview

It is argued that philosophy of religion should focus not only on the epistemic justifiability of holding religious beliefs but also on the moral justifiability of commitment to their truth in practical reasoning. If the truth of classical theism may turn out to be evidentially ambiguous, then pressure is placed on the moral evidentialist assumption that one is morally justified in taking a theistic truth‐claim to be true only if one's total evidence sufficiently supports its truth. After investigating some contemporary attempts to retain evidentialism in the face of ambiguity, a modest fideism is proposed which may serve both to ground an important ‘political turn’ in contemporary philosophy of religion and to prompt re‐examination of dominant assumptions about the content of core theistic beliefs.